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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
William James
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Your attitude during conflicts can either harm or strengthen your relationships.

This quote by William James emphasizes the importance of one's attitude when navigating conflicts with others. A positive or constructive attitude can transform a potentially damaging situation into an opportunity for growth and deeper connection, while a negative attitude can lead to further discord and misunderstanding.

Themes

AttitudeConflictRelationshipsCommunicationGrowth

In practice

Example use cases

In a team meeting where disagreements arise, this quote can remind members to stay positive.

More from William James

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
William JamesRead
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
William JamesRead
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
William JamesRead
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
William JamesRead
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William JamesRead
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
William JamesRead

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