Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
WILLIAM JAMESOur 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.
More William James Quotes
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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Footnotes — little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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No bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
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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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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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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







