"Effort is a measure of a Man."
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William James quotes (page 9 of 36)
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"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend."
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"The soul is stronger than its surroundings."
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"[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted."
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"The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence."
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"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
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"Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions."
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"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone."
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"A thing is important if anyone think it important."
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"An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."
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"Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia."
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"I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE."
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"I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!."
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"A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last."
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"I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all."
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"Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world."
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"Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits."
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"Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."
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"The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god."
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"The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts."
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