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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
Given
Voluntarily
Thought
Aimed
Matter
Float
Enough
Floats
Work
Accord
Long
Daily
Results
Sure
Busily
More quotes by William James
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William James
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
William James
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
William James
The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
William James
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
William James
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
William James
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
