QUOTES by William James

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“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.” 
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William James

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“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” 
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William James

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“The attempt at introspective analysis... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.” 
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“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” 
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“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ” 
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William James

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“Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.” 
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“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.” 
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William James

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“The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.” 
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William James

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“Damn the Absolute!” 
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William James

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“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.” 
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William James

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“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.” 
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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.” 
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William James

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“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.” 
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William James

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“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.” 
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William James

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“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?” 
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“A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.” 
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“I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing.” 
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William James

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“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.” 
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“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.” 
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“It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.” 
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“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.” 

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“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.” 
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William James

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“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.” 
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William James

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“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.” 
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William James

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“Belief creates the actual fact.” 
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William James

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“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.” 
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William James

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“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.” 
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William James

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“Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.” 
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William James

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“Why should we think upon things that are lovely Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.” 
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“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
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William James

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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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“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.” 
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William James

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“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” 
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William James

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“Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.” 
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William James

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“...do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.” 
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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.” 
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“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.” 
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William James

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“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” 
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William James

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“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task” 
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William James

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“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” 
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William James

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“Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.” 
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William James

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“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” 
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William James

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“Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction”
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William James

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“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.” 
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William James

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“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” 
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William James

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“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.” 
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William James

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“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ” 
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William James

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“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.” 
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William James

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