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Time Quotes by William James

40 Time quotes by William James

All Time quotes William James’s page

A clock that ticks while we think shows that changing our thoughts can change our life. The quotes explain that imagining a bright future pulls us forward, and that many people act to find and keep happiness. They also note that treating time as a simple list of days is only a mental shortcut.

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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

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Time itself comes in drops.

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

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

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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time

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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.

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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.

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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at…

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

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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time…

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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,…

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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially…

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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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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience…

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“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense…

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We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments,…

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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the…

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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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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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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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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One…

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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…

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“Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still…

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In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong,…

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Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call…

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“This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best…

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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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“The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature…

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“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the…

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

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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive…

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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ...…

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I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular…

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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment…

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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…

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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and…

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Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural…

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If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us…

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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil…

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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…