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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.
William James
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Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.
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No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
William James
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When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
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Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. … So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.
William James
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The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.
William James
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
William James
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
William James
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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
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First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James
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It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical.
William James
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
William James
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
William James
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
William James
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
William James
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Action and feeling go together, and by regulating the action... we can directly regulate the feeling.
William James
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Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
William James
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
William James
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
William James
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Minds so earnest and helpless that it takes them a half-an-hour to get from one idea to its immediately adjacent next neighbor, and then they lie down on it…like a cow on a doormat, so that you can get neither in nor out with them.
William James
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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.
William James
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy... In finishing it I found... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
William James
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
William James
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Born:
January 11, 1842
Died:
August 26, 1910
(aged 68)
Bio:
William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician.
Known for:
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
The Will to Believe (1896)
A pluralistic universe (1908)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1909)
Most used words:
life
truth
man
human
fact
difference
consciousness
war
feeling
day
universe
sense
true
real
thought
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