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Habit is the great flywheel of society.

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
Great
Habit
Society

More quotes by William James

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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
William James
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
William James
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
William James
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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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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 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.
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
William James