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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
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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
Word
Prescriptions
Attention
Inevitably
Show
Aspects
Away
Wander
Wanders
Shows
Subject
Prompt
Change
Questions
Prescription
Must
Aspect
Prompts
Made
Subjects
Unchanging
More quotes by William James
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.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
What holds attention determines action.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
William James
Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
William James
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
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The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
William James