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 JAMESEffort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
More William James Quotes
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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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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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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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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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can’t tolerate.
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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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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
WILLIAM JAMES