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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
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20 quotes by William James · clear filters
When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.
The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort.
If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it.
The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.
Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.
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 usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.
Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.
The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before.
We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.
The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.
The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler.