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Truth is something that happens to an idea.

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
Truth
Ideas
Something
Idea
Happens

More quotes by William James

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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
William James
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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
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
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Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
William James
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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
William James
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
William James
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
William James
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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Lets take full advantage of this discovery
William James
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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.
William James
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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
William James