"To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal."
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Quote collection
William James quotes (page 5 of 36)
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"There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self."
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"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy."
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"The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can."
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"There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness."
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"When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice."
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"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain."
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"Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information."
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"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed."
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"Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits."
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"For the moment, what we attend to is reality."
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"We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground."
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"As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings."
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"The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one."
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"Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture."
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"The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone."
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"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door."
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"The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him."
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"Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness."
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"Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will."
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