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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

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
Proud
Example
Advising
Others
Shrink
Nature
Passionately
Human
Shrinks
Humans
Extreme
Extremes
Follow

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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
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Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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Lets take full advantage of this discovery
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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