“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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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.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Character
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“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Humor
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“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Leadership
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“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Life
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“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Life
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“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Life
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“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Life
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“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Motivational
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“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Success
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“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sports
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“Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy thesein advance or not.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“… if we take the universe of ‘fitting,’ countless coats ‘fit’ backs, and countless boots ‘fit’ feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones ‘fit’ gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions ‘fit’ realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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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.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Youth
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“For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.”
William James
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Morality
