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 JAMESThe total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
More William James Quotes
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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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.
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With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
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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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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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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
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History is a bath of blood.
WILLIAM JAMES