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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.

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
Anything
Acceptance
Ideas
Finally
Important
Goes
Great
Stage
Dismissed
Really
Seen
Acknowledged
Way
Idea
Stages
Three
Insignificant
True
Nonsense

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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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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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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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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.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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