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Truth is something that happens to an idea.

William James

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to ‘principles,’ and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
WILLIAM JAMES

Habit Principles Thinking
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

Law Science Together
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
WILLIAM JAMES

Men Philosophy Social
Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is ‘ten times nature’.
WILLIAM JAMES

Educational Inspirational Philosophy
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
WILLIAM JAMES

Broken Concepts Reality
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
WILLIAM JAMES

Agony Individual Lonely
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
WILLIAM JAMES

Facts Philosophy Way
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
WILLIAM JAMES

Lying Misunderstood Statistics
The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
WILLIAM JAMES

Consciousness Mystic Opinion
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
WILLIAM JAMES

Mind Philosophy Quiet
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
WILLIAM JAMES

Law Medicine Philosophy
We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
WILLIAM JAMES

Islands Roots Sea Underground
No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
WILLIAM JAMES

Details Generalization Knowledge
All of our life is but a mass of small habits – practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual – that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
WILLIAM JAMES

Destiny Military Spiritual
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
WILLIAM JAMES

Men Responsibility Stronger
We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
WILLIAM JAMES

Habit Past Self

Truth is something that happens to an idea.

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Truth is something that happens to an idea.

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