"To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind."
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Quote collection
William James quotes (page 26 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed"
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"Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections"
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"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation."
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"Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university."
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"The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing."
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"We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer."
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"Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."
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"That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief."
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"We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing."
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"Lets take full advantage of this discovery"
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"But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task."
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"The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change."
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"An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total."
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"No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody."
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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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"All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny."
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"It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association"
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"Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart."
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"So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience."
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