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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
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
Held
Theatre
Instinct
Mankind

More quotes by William James

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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
William James
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
William James
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
William James
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
William James
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
William James
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
William James
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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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.
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James