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"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives."
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"In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary."

"A man in passion rides a horse that runs away with him."

"There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in."

"The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything."

"In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad."
Explore more quotes by William James

"Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use."

"Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts."

"Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another."

"I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

"Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it."
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