Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
WILLIAM JAMESFor morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
More William James Quotes
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A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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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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Man, biologically considered … is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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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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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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There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
WILLIAM JAMES