"[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important."
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William James quotes (page 22 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith."
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"The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion."
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"Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing."
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"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way."
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"Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics."
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"Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked."
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"In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse."
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"All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride."
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"Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'"
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"The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything."
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"What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.""
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"[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on."
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"It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed."
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"Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage."
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"Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy."
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"A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result."
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"We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life."
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"Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint."
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"Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not."
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