The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “William James”

The Delicate Art of Connection: William James on the Most Important Attitude for Relationships
The Delicate Art of Connection: William James on the Most Important Attitude for Relationships

“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.”

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Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death: How the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics
Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death: How the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics

“There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have no physical properties which are in any way different.”

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Marcus Aurelius on How to Live Through Difficult Times
Marcus Aurelius on How to Live Through Difficult Times

“Accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe.”

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Pioneering Psychologist William James on Attention, Multitasking, and the Mental Habit That Sets Great Minds Apart
Pioneering Psychologist William James on Attention, Multitasking, and the Mental Habit That Sets Great Minds Apart

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

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William James on the Psychology of the Second Wind and What Enables Us to Transcend Our Limits
William James on the Psychology of the Second Wind and What Enables Us to Transcend Our Limits

“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake… We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

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Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Presses the Reset Button of the Brain’s Default Mode Network
Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Presses the Reset Button of the Brain’s Default Mode Network

“Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit.”

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The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke
The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke

We are not “patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance” but “specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life.”

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William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences
William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences

“Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

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What Is an Emotion? William James’s Revolutionary 1884 Theory of How Our Bodies Affect Our Feelings
What Is an Emotion? William James’s Revolutionary 1884 Theory of How Our Bodies Affect Our Feelings

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”

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William James on Choosing Purpose Over Profit and the Life-Changing Power of a Great Mentor
William James on Choosing Purpose Over Profit and the Life-Changing Power of a Great Mentor

“After all, the great problem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together.”

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