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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Principles of Psychology
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
WILLIAM JAMES, Psychology: The Briefer Course
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
WILLIAM JAMES, Talks to Teachers on Psychology
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of the venture.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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