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Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
1870s

“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 10

“The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

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William James

To Henry Rutgers Marshall (7 February 1899)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)

“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch.10

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

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William James

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

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William James

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

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William James

“What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1906) and at Columbia University, New York City, (January 1907)
1900s

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 13

“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions…. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 21

“The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 9

“Quoting an unnamed writer: "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do," I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or… to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter?… Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."”

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William James

Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.”

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William James

Lecture XIX, "Other Characteristics"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?…It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.”

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William James

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.155
1880s

“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”

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William James

"The Will to Believe" p. 205 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA205 <br class="br">1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! … Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.”

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William James

Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 9

“A thing is important if anyone think it important.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 28, Note 35

“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”

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William James

Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

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William James

Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. … You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.”

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William James

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.”

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William James

A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science (1892)
1920s, Collected Essays and Reviews (1920)

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

“Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.”

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William James

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)

“Freedom is only necessity understood.”

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William James

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
1880s

“The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”

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William James

Quelle: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 21

“The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.”

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William James

"The Acquisition of Ideas"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

“Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.”

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William James

Lecture IX, "Conversion, concluded"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?”

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William James

Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”

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William James

The Dilemma of Determinism in "The Will to Believe" p. 151 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA151 <br class="br">1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.”

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William James

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)