Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

William James
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  1. One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are. - Idries Shah

  2. The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate. - Idries Shah

  3. All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess) - Blanche Bachelar

  4. Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased. - Philip Rieff

  5. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own .. . and that the trouble... - Robert A. Heinlein

More Quotes By William James
  1. The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.

  2. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

  3. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

  4. Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true, " it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if...

  5. See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains...

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