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
WILLIAM JAMESMankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
More William James Quotes
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
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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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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is ‘ten times nature’.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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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.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Men’s activities are occupied into ways — in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
WILLIAM JAMES -
It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
WILLIAM JAMES