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"To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal."
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"To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal."
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."

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

"It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome."

"Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction."

"No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope."
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