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"Most men's friendships are too inarticulate."
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"When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend."

"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."

"The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself."

"To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I'd never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people."

"This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny."

"My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant."

"That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."

"While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind."

"Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends."

"Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation."
Explore more quotes by William James


"Four Characters in Consciousness-How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects-chooses from among them, in a word-all the while."


"Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows."


"Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them."


"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation."


"So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience."


"Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law."


"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."


"Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal."


"Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstances."
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