Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
WILLIAM JAMESNo one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
More William James Quotes
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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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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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves… instead of talking to themselves.
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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
WILLIAM JAMES -
You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don’t dream about.
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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Habit 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.
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
WILLIAM JAMES -
There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
WILLIAM JAMES