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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

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
Theatre
Instinct
Mankind
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
Held

More quotes by William James

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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
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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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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
William James