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Inspirational Quotes by William James

61 Inspirational quotes by William James

All Inspirational quotes William James’s page

A circumstance reveals who we are, not who we become. The quotes remind us that friends shape our world, that our mind feeds on what we choose, and that cultivating silence is as vital as speaking. They also urge us to act as if cheerfulness already lives inside.

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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.

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I will act as if I do make a difference.

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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

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Events are influenced by our very great desires.

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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

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Individuality is founded in feeling

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All religions begin with the cry Help.

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It is your friends who make your world.

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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

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The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.

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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.

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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.

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

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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.

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“There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as…

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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it…

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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use…

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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep…

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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

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Belief creates the actual fact. --William James

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“Psychology is the science of mental life”

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The perfection of rottenness.

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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.

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History is a bath of blood.

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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.

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Our beliefs are really rules for action.

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Lets take full advantage of this discovery

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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

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Belief creates the actual fact.

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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.

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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.

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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

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

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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

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

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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…