There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
WILLIAM JAMESA paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result.
More William James Quotes
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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Footnotes — little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
WILLIAM JAMES -
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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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 deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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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.
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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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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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end…and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
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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