Quotes by James, William

"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."

James, William on adversity
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"How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?"

James, William on age and aging   

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"To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified."

James, William on deception   

"Events are influenced by our very great desires."

James, William on desire
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"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it."

James, William on desire
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"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain."

James, William on ecology   

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"We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead."

James, William on effort
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"There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual."

James, William on evil   

"Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."

James, William on facts   

"The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals."

James, William on facts
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"I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not. If I could, be... a great athlete and make a million a year, be a wit, a born -- vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist ... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life. Be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more of less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failure are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them."

James, William on failure   

"Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results."

James, William on failure   

"There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self."

James, William on failure
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"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."

James, William on faith
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"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."

James, William on faith   

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

James, William on faith   

"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."

James, William on fatigue
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"Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done."

James, William on feelings   

"Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him."

James, William on free will   

"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."

James, William on freedom   

"Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, 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 inertia."

James, William on friends and friendship
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"Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way."

James, William on genius   

"To spend life for something which outlasts it."

James, William on achievement
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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."

James, William on aggression   

"If merely feeling good could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience."

James, William on alcohol and alcoholism
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"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes."

James, William on alcohol and alcoholism
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"Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness."

James, William on god   

"The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old."

James, William on growth
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"Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor."

James, William on habit   

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life."

James, William on habit
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"Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction."

James, William on happiness
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"Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever."

James, William on heroes and heroism   

"Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do."

James, William on honesty
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"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong."

James, William on ideals and idealism   

"A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows."

James, William on ideas   

"An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."

James, William on ideas   

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the as if technique."

James, William on imagination
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"The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one."

James, William on immortality
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"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."

James, William on indecision   

"Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another."

James, William on knowledge   

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