The true’to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
WILLIAM JAMESThe 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.
More William James Quotes
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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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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
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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.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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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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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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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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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
WILLIAM JAMES