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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

William James

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.
WILLIAM JAMES

Happiness Music Philosophical
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.
WILLIAM JAMES

Appreciation Attitude Philosophy
Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
WILLIAM JAMES

Congratulations Self Esteem Success
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
WILLIAM JAMES

Health Love Wings
There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
WILLIAM JAMES

Differences Making Somewhere
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
WILLIAM JAMES

Intellectual Men Order
Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
WILLIAM JAMES

Anything Firmly Imagination May
So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
WILLIAM JAMES

Feelings Self World
Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
WILLIAM JAMES

Attention Belief Facts
The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.
WILLIAM JAMES

Able Accompanying Thinking
Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
WILLIAM JAMES

Becoming Gone Instant
The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
WILLIAM JAMES

Appreciated Humans Needs
Footnotes — little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
WILLIAM JAMES

Dog Littles Writing
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
WILLIAM JAMES

Boiling Experience Over Way
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.
WILLIAM JAMES

Anticipation Brave Use
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
WILLIAM JAMES

Art Men Philosophy
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
WILLIAM JAMES

Inspirational Philosophical Sadness
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
WILLIAM JAMES

Credit Facts Truth
Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
WILLIAM JAMES

Character Circumstances Enough Repeated
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
WILLIAM JAMES

Educational Philosophy School
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
WILLIAM JAMES

Heroism Reality Theatre
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
WILLIAM JAMES

Esteem Leadership Quality Self
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
WILLIAM JAMES

Function Intellect Thinking
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
WILLIAM JAMES

Abnormal Philosophical Understanding
Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
WILLIAM JAMES

Broken Funny Habit
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
WILLIAM JAMES

Law Science Together
For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
WILLIAM JAMES

Attend Moments Reality

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

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Popular Authors

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