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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

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
Individual
Every
Spasm
Shambles
Agony
Helpless
Lonely
Goes
Existence

More quotes by William James

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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
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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.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
William James
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Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
William James
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We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
William James
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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.
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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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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James