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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Certain
Must
Way
Vindicated
Attacks
Considered
Critics
Religion

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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
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