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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

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
Toward
Abstraction
Pragmatist
Principles
Closed
Pragmatists
Turns
Systems
Adequacy
Action
Fixed
Insufficiency
Facts
Absolutes
Priori
Away
Reasons
Pretended
Power
Towards
Origins
Reason
Solutions
Verbal

More quotes by William James

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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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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.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
William James
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
William James
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
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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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
William James
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Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
William James
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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
William James
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
William James
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James