To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
WILLIAM JAMESA new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
More William James Quotes
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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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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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
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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.
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If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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What would be better for us to believe!’ This sounds very like a definition of truth
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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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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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits – practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual – that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
WILLIAM JAMES