William James Quotes

• Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

  William James

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  Tags in Makes, Act, Different

• Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

  William James

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  Tags in Overlook, Learning

• Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

  William James

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  Tags in Habit, Think

• Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

  William James

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  Tags in Supreme, Price

• Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

  William James

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  Tags in Deepening, Between

• When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

  William James

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  Tags in Choice, Make

• Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

  William James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lengthy, Universe

• What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

  William James

  Tags in Philosopher, Genuine

• We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

  William James

  Tags in Opposite, Statement

• We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

  William James

  Topics in Wisdom

  Tags in Today, Falsehood

• We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh.

  William James

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  Tags in Because, Happy

• We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

  William James

  Tags in Unendurable, Cling

• We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

  William James

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  Tags in Good Man, Some

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in System, Fact

• To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

  William James

  Tags in Normal, Abnormal

• To spend life for something which outlasts it.

  William James

  Tags in Outlasts, Spend

• To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

  William James

  Tags in Element, Empiricism

• To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

  William James

  Tags in Awareness, Means

• To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

  William James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosopher, Some

• Time itself comes in drops.

  William James

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Come

William James (125)

Birth:	11th January, 1842
Death:	26th August, 1910
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Philosopher, Psychologist

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Deaths

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• 1917 - Oswald J. Chambers
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