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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
Held
Theatre
Instinct
Mankind
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
More quotes by William James
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
William James
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
William James
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James
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
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
William James
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
William James
It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
William James
Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
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.
William James
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
William James
Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
William James
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William James
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James