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Men Quotes by William James

85 Men quotes by William James

All Men quotes William James’s page

Success or failure often hinges on attitude rather than raw ability. The quotes point out that how we label our feelings and what we claim as ours shapes our actions. They also suggest that true insight comes from questioning even the most basic assumptions.

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Effort is a measure of a Man.

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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.

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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.

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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.

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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse

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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries

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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

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Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.

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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.

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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given…

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Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are…

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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you…

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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the…

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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…

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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth…

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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to…

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Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus…

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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and…

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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He…

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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.…

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Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to…

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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in…

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I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable…

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Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual…

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Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted…

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We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in…

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What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious…

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It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than…

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Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass…

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Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities,…

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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.

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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

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

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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.

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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.

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More by William James

Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we…

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who…

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered…

Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or…

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

It is your friends who make your world.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them,…

“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and…

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.

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

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes…