Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
WILLIAM JAMESHe who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
More William James Quotes
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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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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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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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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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
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Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to ‘principles,’ and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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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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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
WILLIAM JAMES