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There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing

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
Flowing
Dynamic
Latter
Former
Concepts
Reality
Must
Discontinuous
Always
Static

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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Man lives for science as well as bread.
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
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Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
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