"I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly."
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William James quotes (page 19 of 36)
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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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"...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them."
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"Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift."
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"Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits."
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"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive."
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"For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers."
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"A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians."
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"Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them."
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"When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries."
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"We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct."
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"The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity."
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"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance."
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"The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds."
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"Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness."
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"Most men's friendships are too inarticulate."
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"The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be."
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"Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself."
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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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"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."
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