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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.

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
Long
Daily
Results
Sure
Busily
Given
Voluntarily
Thought
Aimed
Matter
Float
Enough
Floats
Work
Accord

More quotes by William James

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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
William James
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
William James
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
William James
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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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In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
William James