"The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it."
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Quote collection
William James quotes (page 17 of 36)
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"Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought."
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"The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others."
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"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours."
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"Truth in our ideas means their power to work."
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"Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?"
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"Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement."
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"Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom."
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"Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'."
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"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."
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"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition"
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"You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience."
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"What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise."
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"Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark."
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"If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight."
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"In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start."
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"Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge."
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"The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments."
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"Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them."
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"A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates."
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