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

More quotes by William James

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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
William James
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
William James
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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
William James
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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.
William James
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
William James
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
William James
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Truth happens to an idea
William James
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Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James