"Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude."
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Quote collection
William James quotes (page 7 of 36)
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"If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick."
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"Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours."
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"What holds attention determines action."
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"Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference."
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"A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first."
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"The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance."
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"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger."
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"The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck."
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"The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires."
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"The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly."
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"Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do."
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"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way."
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"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints."
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"Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile."
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"You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about."
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"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."
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"Truth is something that happens to an idea."
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"We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all."
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"We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed."
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