Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
WILLIAM JAMESHabit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
More William James Quotes
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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Give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can’t tolerate.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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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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Individuality is founded in feeling
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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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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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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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History is a bath of blood.
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Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do
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We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander’s eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
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If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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What would be better for us to believe!’ This sounds very like a definition of truth
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
WILLIAM JAMES