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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.

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
Interest
Interesting
Become
Associated
May
Object
Exists
Objects
Becoming
Already

More quotes by William James

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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
William James
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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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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
William James
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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
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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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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
William James
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
William James
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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