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All The Daily Routine Of Life, Our Dressing And Undressing, The Coming And Going From Our Work Or Carrying Through Of Its Various Operations, Is Utterly Without Mental Reference To Pleasure And Pain, Except Under Rarely Realized Conditions.

-William James

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All The Daily Routine

William James

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All The Daily Routine Of Life, Our Dressing And Undressing, The Coming And Going From Our Work Or Carrying Through Of Its Various Operations, Is Utterly Without Mental Reference To Pleasure And Pain, Except Under Rarely Realized Conditions.

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Conversion Is In Its Essence A Normal Adolescent Phenomenon, Incidental To The Passage From The Child's Small Universe To The Wider Intellectual And Spiritual Life Of Maturity.

We Have To Live Today By What Truth We Can Get Today And Be Ready Tomorrow To Call It Falsehood.

Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life. Each Lapse Is Like The Letting Fall Of A Ball Of String Which One Is Carefully Winding Up; A Single Slip Undoes More Than A Great Many Turns Will Wind Again.

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

... A Rule Of Thinking Which Would Absolutely Prevent Me From Acknowledging Certain Kinds Of Truth If Those ... Truths Were Really There, Would Be An Irrational Rule.

It Is Wrong Always, Everywhere, And For Everyone, To Believe Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence.

...by Far The Most Usual Way Of Handling Phenomena So Novel That They Would Make For A Serious Rearrangement Of Our Preconceptions Is To Ignore Them Altogether, Or To Abuse Those Who Bear Witness For Them.

We Hear The Words We Have Spoken, Feel Our Own Blow As We Give It, Or Read In The Bystander's Eyes The Success Or Failure Of Our Conduct.

To Neglect The Wise Sayings Of Great Thinkers Is To Deny Ourselves The Truest Education.

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

Our Theories Are Wedged And Controlled As Nothing Else Is. Yet Sometimes Alternative Theoretic Formulas Are Equally Compatible With All The Truths We Know, And Then We Choose Between Them For Subjective Reasons. We Choose The Kind Of Theory To Which We Are Already Partial: We Follow 'elegenace' Or 'economy'

That Reality Is 'independent' Means That There Is Something In Every Experience That Escapes Our Arbitrary Control. If It Be A Sensible Experience It Coerces Our Attention; If A Sequence, We Cannot Invert It; If We Compare Two Terms We Can Come To Only One Result. There Is A Push, An Urgency, Within Our Very Experience, Against Which We Are On The Whole Powerless, And Which Drives Us In A Direction That Is The Destiny Of Our Belief.

It Is Very Important That Teachers Should Realize The Importance Of Habit.

There Is No Doubt That Healthy-mindedness Is Inadequate As A Philosophical Doctrine, Because The Evil Facts Which It Refuses Positively To Account For Are A Genuine Portion Of Reality; And They May After All Be The Best Key To Life's Significance, And Possibly The Only Openers Of Our Eyes To The Deepest Levels Of Truth.

There's Nothing So Absurd That If You Repeat It Often Enough, People Will Believe It.

A Man Does Not Cry Because He Is Sad, He Is Sad Because He Cries

The Deepest Hunger In Human Beings Is The Desire To Be Appreciated.

You Must Bring Out Of Each Word Its Practical Cash-value, Set It At Work Within The Stream Of Your Experience.

It Is As Important To Cultivate Your Silence Power As Your Word Power.

This Overcoming Of All The Usual Barriers Between The Individual And The Absolute Is The Great Mystic Achievement. In Mystic States We Both Become One With The Absolute And We Become Aware Of Our Oneness. This Is The Everlasting And Triumphant Mystical Tradition, Hardly Altered By Differences Of Clime Or Creed.

The Subjectivist In Morals, When His Moral Feelings Are At War With The Facts About Him, Is Always Free To Seek Harmony By Toningdown The Sensitiveness Of The Feelings.

There Is Nothing So Absurd That It Cannot Be Believed As Truth If Repeated Often Enough.

We May Be In The Universe As Dogs And Cats Are In Our Libraries, Seeing The Books And Hearing The Conversation, But Having No Inkling Of The Meaning Of It All.

In The Acquisition Of A New Habit, Or The Leaving Off Of An Old One, We Must Take Care To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided An Initiative As Possible.

Belief Is Desecrated When Given To Unproved And Unquestioned Statements For The Solace And Private Pleasure Of The Believer . . . It Is Wrong Always, Everywhere, And For Every One, To Believe Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence.

Philosophy Is At Once The Most Sublime And The Most Trivial Of Human Pursuits. It Works In The Minutest Crannies And It Opens Outthe Widest Vistas. It 'bakes No Bread', As Has Been Said, But It Can Inspire Our Souls With Courage.

Materialism Means Simply The Denial That The Moral Order Is Eternal, And The Cutting Off Of Ultimate Hopes; Spiritualism Means Theaffirmation Of An Eternal Moral Order And The Letting Loose Of Hope.

Man's Chief Difference From The Brutes Lies In The Exuberant Excess Of His Subjective Propensities. Prune His Extravagance, Sober Him, And You Undo Him.

Action Seems To Follow Feeling, But Really Action And Feeling Go Together; And By Regulating The Action, Which Is Under The More Direct Control Of The Will, We Can Indirectly Regulate The Feeling.

We Want All Our Friends To Tell Us Our Bad Qualities; It Is Only The Particular Ass That Does So Whom We Can't Tolerate.

Cute Friendship

Tension Is A Habit. Relaxing Is A Habit. Bad Habits Can Be Broken, Good Habits Formed.

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

Plasticity, Then, In The Wide Sense Of The Word, Means The Possession Of A Structure Weak Enough To Yield To An Influence, But Strong Enough Not To Yield All At Once. Each Relatively Stable Phase Of Equilibrium In Such A Structure Is Marked By What We May Call A New Set Of Habits.

No Decision Is, In Itself, A Decision.

The Nation Blest Above All Nations Is She In Whom The Civic Genius Of The People Does The Saving Day By Day, By Acts Without External Picturesqueness; By Speaking, Writing, Voting Reasonably; By Smiting Corruption Swiftly; By Good Temper Between Parties; By The People Knowing True Men When They See Them, And Preferring Them As Leaders To Rabid Partisans And Empty Quacks.

I Know That You, Ladies And Gentlemen, Have A Philosophy, Each And All Of You, And That The Most Interesting And Important Thing About You Is The Way In Which It Determines The Perspective In Your Several Worlds.

The First Thing That Intellect Does With An Object Is To Class It With Something Else.

The Old Question Of Whether There Is Design Is Idle. The Real Question Is What Is The World, Whether Or Not It Have A Designer--and That Can Be Revealed Only By The Study Of All Nature's Particulars.

'what Would Be Better For Us To Believe!' This Sounds Very Like A Definition Of Truth

The Love Of Life, At Any And Every Level Of Development, Is The Religious Impulse.

A Paradise Of Inward Tranquility Seems To Be Faith's Usual Result.

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

Science Must Constantly Be Reminded That Her Purposes Are Not The Only Purposes And That The Order Of Uniform Causation Which She Has Use For, And Is Therefore Right In Postulating, May Be Enveloped In A Wider Order, On Which She Has No Claim At All.

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

Every Individual Existence Goes Out In A Lonely Spasm Of Helpless Agony.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All.

... Religious Experience, As We Have Studied It, Cannot Be Cited As Unequivocally Supporting The Infinitist Belief. The Only Thingthat It Unequivocally Testifies To Is That We Can Experience Union With Something Larger Than Ourselves And In That Union Find Our Greatest Peace.

What A Teacher Needs To Know About Psychology "might Almost Be Written On The Palm Of One's Hand."

The Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

So Long As Antimilitarists Propose No Substitute For War's Disciplinary Function, No Moral Equivalent Of War, Analogous, As One Might Say, To The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat, So Long They Fail To Realize The Full Inwardness Of The Situation.

From The Vedas We Learn A Practical Art Of Surgery, Medicine, Music, House Building Under Which Mechanized Art Is Included. They Are Encyclopedia Of Every Aspect Of Life, Culture, Religion, Science, Ethics, Law, Cosmology And Meteorology.

Culture Religion

Formula To Live Your Dream: 1. Be Bold. 2. Begin Now, 3. No Exceptions.

Why Should We Think Upon Things That Are Lovely? Because Thinking Determines Life. It Is A Common Habit To Blame Life Upon The Environment. Environment Modifies Life But Does Not Govern Life. The Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

In All This Process Of Acquiring Conceptions, A Certain Instinctive Order Is Followed. There Is A Native Tendency To Assimilate Certain Kinds Of Conception At One Age, And Other Kinds Of Conception At A Later Age.

We Can Act As If There Were A God; Feel As If We Were Free; Consider Nature As If She Were Full Of Special Designs; Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal; And We Find Then That These Words Do Make A Genuine Difference In Our Moral Life.

There Can Be No Final Truth In Ethics Any More Than In Physics, Until The Last Man Has Had His Experience And Said His Say.

I Don't Sing Because I'm Happy; I'm Happy Because I Sing.

The Sway Of Alcohol Over Mankind Is Unquestionably Due To Its Power To Stimulate The Mystical Faculties Of Human Nature, Usually Crushed To Earth By The Cold Facts And Dry Criticisms Of The Sober Hour.

The Greatest Weapon We Have To Combat Stress Is The Ability To Choose Our Thoughts.

The Exercise Of Voluntary Attention In The Schoolroom Must Therefore Be Counted One Of The Most Important Points Of Training That Take Place There; And The First-rate Teacher, By The Keenness Of The Remoter Interests Which He Is Able To Awaken, Will Provide Abundant Opportunities For Its Occurrence.

If The Topic Be Highly Abstract, Show Its Nature By Concrete Examples. If It Be Unfamiliar, Trace Some Point Of Analogy In It With The Known. If It Be Inhuman, Make It Figure As Part Of A Story. If It Be Difficult, Couple Its Acquisition With Some Prospect Of Personal Gain. Above All Things, Make Sure That It Shall Run Through Certain Inner Changes, Since No Unvarying Object Can Possibly Hold The Mental Field For Long.

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

To Be A Real Philosopher All That Is Necessary Is To Hate Some One Else's Type Of Thinking.

The Study A Posteriori Of The Distribution Of Consciousness Shows It To Be Exactly Such As We Might Expect In An Organ Added For The Sake Of Steering A Nervous System Grown Too Complex To Regulate Itself.

Since You Make Evil Or Good By Your Own Thoughts, It Is Your Ruling Of Your Thoughts Which Proves To Be Your Principal Concern.

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

'pure Experience' Is The Name I Gave To The Immediate Flux Of Life Which Furnishes The Material To Our Later Reflection With Its Conceptual Categories.

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

The Great Use Of Life Is To Spend It For Something That Will Outlast It." "this Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It." "believe That Life Is Worth Living And Your Belief Will Help Create The Fact.

Inspirational Life

As The Art Of Reading (after A Certain Stage In One's Education) Isthe Art Of Skipping, So The Art Of Being Wise Is The Art Of Knowing What To Overlook.

In The Matter Of Belief, We Are All Extreme Conservatives.

I Do Indeed Disbelieve That We Or Any Other Mortal Men Can Attain On A Given Day To Absolutely Incorrigible And Unimprovable Truth About Such Matters Of Fact As Those With Which Religions Deal. But I Reject This Dogmatic Ideal Not Out Of A Perverse Delight In Intellectual Instability. I Am No Lover Of Disorder And Doubt As Such. Rather Do I Fear To Lose Truth By This Pretension To Possess It Already Wholly.

Let No Youth Have Any Anxiety About The Upshot Of His Education, Whatever The Line Of It May Be. If He Keep Faithfully Busy Each Hour Of The Working-day, He May Safely Leave The Result To Itself. He Can With Perfect Certainty Count On Waking Up Some Fine Morning To Find Himself One Of The Competent Ones Of His Generation.

No Reception Without Reaction, No Impression Without Correlative Expression, -this Is The Great Maxim Which The Teacher Ought Never To Forget.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can, And As Carefully Guard Against The Growing Into Ways That Are Likely To Be Disadvantageous.

Philosophy, Beginning In Wonder, As Plato And Aristotle Said, Is Able To Fancy Everything Different From What It Is. It Sees The Familiar As If It Were Strange, And The Strange As If It Were Familiar. It Can Take Things Up And Lay Them Down Again. It Rouses Us From Our Native Dogmatic Slumber And Breaks Up Our Caked Prejudices.

To Kill Time Is Not Murder, It's Suicide.

'facts' Are The Bounds Of Human Knowledge, Set For It, Not By It.

As A Rule We Disbelieve All The Facts And Theories For Which We Have No Use.

Habit Is The Great Flywheel Of Society.

Every Claim Creates An Obligation.

No One Sees Further Into A Generalization Than His Own Knowledge Of Detail Extends.

Philosophy Lives In Words, But Truth And Fact Well Up Into Our Lives In Ways That Exceed Verbal Formulation. There Is In The Living Act Of Perception Always Something That Glimmers And Twinkles And Will Not Be Caught, And For Which Reflection Comes Too Late.

The Philosophy Which Is So Important In Each Of Us Is Not A Technical Matter; It Is Our More Or Less Dumb Sense Of What Life Honestly And Deeply Means. It Is Only Partly Got From Books; It Is Our Individual Way Of Just Seeing And Feeling The Total Push And Pressure Of The Cosmos.

The Most Ancient Parts Of Truth . . . Also Once Were Plastic. They Also Were Called True For Human Reasons. They Also Mediated Between Still Earlier Truths And What In Those Days Were Novel Observations. Purely Objective Truth, Truth In Whose Establishment The Function Of Giving Human Satisfaction In Marrying Previous Parts Of Experience With Newer Parts Played No Role Whatsoever, Is Nowhere To Be Found. The Reasons Why We Call Things True Is The Reason Why They Are True, For To Be True Means Only To Perform This Marriage-function.

Or If The Hypothesis Were Offered Us Of A World In Which Messrs. Fourier's And Bellamy's And Morris's Utopias Should All Be Outdone, And Millions Kept Permanently Happy On The One Simple Condition That A Certain Lost Soul On The Far-off Edge Of Things Should Lead A Life Of Lonely Torment, What Except A Specifical And Independent Sort Of Emotion Can It Be Which Would Make Us Immediately Feel, Even Though An Impulse Arose Within Us To Clutch At The Happiness So Offered, How Hideous A Thing Would Be Its Enjoyment When Deliberately Accepted As The Fruit Of Such A Bargain?

Seek Out That Particular Mental Attribute Which Makes You Feel Most Deeply And Vitally Alive, Along With Which Comes The Inner Voice Which Says, 'this Is The Real Me,' And When You Have Found That Attitude, Follow It.

It Is Our Attitude At The Beginning Of A Difficult Task Which, More Than Anything Else, Will Affect Its Successful Outcome.

When A Thing Is New, People Say: ‘it Is Not True.’ Later, When Its Truth Becomes Obvious, They Say: ‘it Is Not Important.’ Finally, When Its Importance Cannot Be Denied, They Say: ‘anyway, It Is Not New.

The Greatest Weapon Against Stress Is Our Ability To Choose One Thought Over Another.

There Is But One Indefectibly Certain Truth , And That Is The Truth That Pyrrhonistic Scepticism Itself Leaves Standing, The Truth That The Present Phenomenon Of Consciousness Exists.

But Petitional Prayer Is Only One Department Of Prayer; And If We Take The Word In The Wider Sense As Meaning Every Kind Of Inward Communion Or Conversation With The Power Recognized As Divine, We Can Easily See That Scientific Criticism Leaves It Untouched. Prayer In This Wide Sense Is The Very Soul And Essence Of Religion.

An Experience, Perceptual Or Conceptual, Must Conform To Reality In Order To Be True

It Seems The Natural Thing For Us To Listen Whilst The Europeans Talk.

To Study The Abnormal Is The Best Way Of Understanding The Normal.

The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Spontaneous Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully, To Look Round Cheerfully, And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There. If Such Conduct Does Not Make You Soon Feel Cheerful, Nothing Else On That Occasion Can.

Psychology Saves Us From Mistakes. It Makes Us More Clear As To What We Are About. We Gain Confidence In Respect To Any Method Which We Are Using As Soon As We Believe That It Has Theory As Well As Practice At Its Back.

Actions Seems To Follow Feeling, But Really Actions And Feeling Go Together; And By Regulating The Action, Which Is Under The More Direct Control Of The Will, We Can Indirectly Regulate The Feeling, Which Is Not. Thus The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There.

My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To.

Tell Him To Live By Yes And No - Yes To Everything Good, No To Everything Bad.

The Man Whose Acquisitions Stick Is The Man Who Is Always Achieving And Advancing Whilst His Neighbors, Spending Most Of Their Time In Relearning What They Once Knew But Have Forgotten, Simply Hold Their Own.

Pretend What We May, The Whole Man Within Us Is At Work When We Form Our Philosophical Opinions. Intellect, Will, Taste, And Passion Co-operate Just As They Do In Practical Affairs; And Lucky It Is If The Passion Be Not Something As Petty As A Love Of Personal Conquest Over The Philosopher Across The Way.

The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race.

I Am Done With Great Things And Big Things, Great Institutions And Big Success, And I Am For Those Tiny, Invisible Molecular Moral Forces That Work From Individual To Individual, Creeping Through The Crannies Of The World Like So Many Rootlets, Or Like The Capillary Oozing Of Water, Yet Which If You Give Them Time, Will Rend The Hardest Monuments Of Man's Pride.

True Ideas Are Those That We Can Assimilate, Validate, Corroborate, And Verify. False Ideas Are Those That We Cannot

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.

The God Whom Science Recognizes Must Be A God Of Universal Laws Exclusively, A God Who Does A Wholesale, Not A Retail Business. He Cannot Accommodate His Processes To The Convenience Of Individuals.

The Thinker Philosophizes As The Lover Loves. Even Were The Consequences Not Only Useless But Harmful, He Must Obey His Impulse.

What A Magnificent Land And Race Is This Britain! Everything About Them Is Of Better Quality Than The Corresponding Thing In The U.s.... Yet I Believe (or Suspect) That Ours Is Eventually The Bigger Destiny, If We Can Only Succeed In Living Up To It.

The Aim Of A College Education Is To Teach You To Know A Good Man When You See One.

The Amount Of Psychology Which Is Necessary To All Teachers Need Not Be Very Great.

In The Last Analysis, Then, We Believe That We All Know And Think About And Talk About The Same World Because We Believe Our Percepts Are Possessed By Us In Common

Act As If What You Do Makes A Difference. It Does.

... If We Take The Universe Of 'fitting,' Countless Coats 'fit' Backs, And Countless Boots 'fit' Feet, On Which They Are Not Practically Fitted; Countless Stones 'fit' Gaps In Walls Into Which No One Seeks To Fit Them Actually. In The Same Way Countless Opinions 'fit' Realities, And Countless Truths Are Valid, Tho No Thinker Ever Thinks Them.

Religions Have Approved Themselves; They Have Ministered To Sundry Vital Needs Which They Found Reigning. When They Violated Other Needs Too Strongly, Or When Other Faiths Came Which Served The Same Needs Better, The First Religions Were Supplanted.

As Long As There Are Postmen, Life Will Have Zest.

There Can Be No Difference Anywhere That Does Not Make A Difference Somewhere.

Making A Difference

Most Men Have A Good Memory For Facts Connected With Their Own Pursuits.

Invention, Using The Term Most Broadly, And Imitation, Are The Two Legs, So To Call Them, On Which The Human Race Historically Has Walked.

If You Want A Quality, Act As If You Already Had It.

Need And Struggle Are What Excite And Inspire Us; Our Hour Of Triumph Is What Brings The Void.

Philosophy Lives In Words, But Truth And Fact Well Up Into Our Lives In Ways That Exceed Verbal Formulation.

Man, Whatever Else He May Be, Is Primarily A Practical Being, Whose Mind Is Given Him To Aid In Adapting Him To This World's Life

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

If Any One Phrase Could Gather Its (religion's) Universal Message, That Phrase Would Be, - All Is Not Vanity In This Universe, Whatever The Appearances May Suggest.

In My Individual Heart I Fully Believe My Faith Is As Robust As Yours. The Trouble With Your Robust And Full Bodied Faiths, However, Is, That They Begin To Cut Each Others Throats Too Soon, And For Getting On In The World And Establishing A Modus Vivendi These Pestilential Refinements And Reasonablenesses And Moderations Have To Creep In.

Earnestness Means Willingness To Live With Energy, Though Energy Bring Pain.

In Youth We May Have An Absolutely New Experience, Subjective Or Objective, Every Hour Of The Day. Apprehension Is Vivid, Retentiveness Strong, And Our Recollections Of That Time, Like Those In A Time Spent In Rapid And Interesting Travel, Are Of Something Intricate, Multitudinous, And Long-drawn-out. But As Each Passing Year Converts Some Of This Experience Into Automatic Routine Which We Hardly Note At All, The Days And The Weeks Smooth Themselves Out In Recollection To A Contentless Unit, And The Years Grow Hollow And Collapse.

New Experiences

However Inadequate Our Ideas Of Causal Efficacy May Be, We Are Less Wide Of The Mark When We Say That Our Ideas And Feelings Have It, Than The Automatists Are When They Say They Haven't It. As In The Night All Cats Are Gray, So In The Darkness Of Metaphysical Criticism All Causes Are Obscure. But One Has No Right To Pull The Pall Over The Psychic Half Of The Subject Only . . . Whilst In The Same Breath One Dogmatizes About Material Causation As If Hume, Kant, And Lotze Had Never Been Born.

Truth Lives, In Fact, For The Most Part On A Credit System. Our Thoughts And Beliefs Pass, So Long As Nothing Challenges Them, Just As Bank-notes Pass So Long As Nobody Refuses Them.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill.

How Many Of Us Persist In A Precipitate Course Which, But For A Moment Of Heedlessness We Might Never Have Entered Upon, Simply Because We Hate To Change Our Minds.

Despair Lames Most People, But It Wakes Others Fully Up.

Our Errors Are Surely Not Such Awfully Solemn Things. In A World Where We Are So Certain To Incur Them In Spite Of All Our Caution, A Certain Lightness Of Heart Seems Healthier Than This Excessive Nervousness On Their Behalf.

We Are All Ready To Be Savage In Some Cause. The Difference Between A Good Man And A Bad One Is The Choice Of The Cause.

If Evolution And The Survival Of The Fittest Be True At All, The Destruction Of Prey And Of Human Rivals Must Have Been Among The Most Important. . . . It Is Just Because Human Bloodthirstiness Is Such A Primitive Part Of Us That It Is So Hard To Eradicate, Especially When A Fight Or A Hunt Is Promised As Part Of The Fun.

Our Intelligence Cannot Wall Itself Up Alive, Like A Pupa In A Chrysalis. It Must At Any Cost Keep On Speaking Terms With The Universe That Engendered It.

...as I Apprehend The Buddhist Doctrine Of Karma, I Agree In Principle With That.

Out Of Time We Cut 'days' And 'nights', 'summers' And 'winters.' We Say What, Each Part Of The Sensible Continuum Is, And All These Abstract Whats Are Concepts. The Intelletual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of A Conceptual Order For The Persceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

Of Course, This Has Its Good Side As Well As Its Bad One. As We Become Permanent Drunkards By So May Separate Drinks, So We Become Saints In The Moral, And Authorities And Experts In The Practical And Scientific Spheres, By So Many Separate Acts And Hours Of Work. Let No Youth Have Any Anxiety About The Upshot Of His Education, Whatever The Line Of It May Be. If He Keep Faithfully Busy Each Hour Of The Working Day, He May Safely Leave The Final Result To Itself.

How Pleasant Is The Day When We Give Up Striving To Be Young-or Slender.

True Ideas Are Those That We Can Assimilate, Validate, Corroborate, And Verify. False Ideas Are Those That We Cannot. That Is The Practical Difference It Makes To Us To Have True Ideas; That Therefore Is The Meaning Of Truth, For It Is All That Truth Is Known As.

The Hell To Be Endured Hereafter, Of Which Theology Tells, Is No Worse Than The Hell We Make For Ourselves In This World By Habitually Fashioned Our Characters In The Wrong Way.

Humanism . . . Is Not A Single Hypothesis Or Theorem, And It Dwells On No New Facts. It Is Rather A Slow Shifting In The Philosophic Perspective, Making Things Appear As From A New Centre Of Interest Or Point Of Sight.

I Am Tired Of The Position Of The Dried-up Critic And Doubter. The Believer Is The True Full Man. (from A Biography Of James By Robert D. Richardson)

Genius... Means Little More Than The Faculty Of Perceiving In An Unhabitual Way.

There Are 3 Rules To Follow If You Want To Change; (1) Start Immediately, (2) Do It Flamboyantly, (3) No Exceptions.

One Hears Of The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat. What We Now Need To Discover In The Social Realm Is The Moral Equivalent Of War: Something Heroic That Will Speak To Men As Universally As War Does, And Yet Will Be As Compatible With Their Spiritual Selves As War Has Proved Itself To Be Incompatible.

Psychology Is A Science, And Teaching Is An Art; And Sciences Never Generate Arts Directly Out Of Themselves.

Our Acts Of Voluntary Attending, As Brief And Fitful As They Are, Are Nevertheless Momentous And Critical, Determining Us, As They Do, To Higher Or Lower Destinies.

My First Act Of Free Will Shall Be To Believe In Free Will.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

Owing To The Fact That All Experience Is A Process, No Point Of View Can Ever Be The Last One

We Are Doomed To Cling To A Life Even While We Find It Unendurable.

Old-fashioned Determinism Was What We May Call Hard Determinism. It Did Not Shrink From Such Words As Fatality, Bondage Of The Will, Necessitation, And The Like. Nowadays, We Have A Soft Determinism Which Abhors Harsh Words, And, Repudiating Fatality, Necessity, And Even Predetermination, Says That Its Real Name Is Freedom; For Freedom Is Only Necessity Understood, And Bondage To The Highest Is Identical With True Freedom.

We Ought, All Of Us, To Realize Each Other In This Intense, Pathetic, And Important Way. If You Say That This Is Absurd, And That We Cannot Be In Love With Everyone At Once, I Merely Point Out To You That, As A Matter Of Fact, Certain Persons Do Exist With An Enormous Capacity For Friendship And For Taking Delight In Other People's Lives; And That Such Persons Know More Of Truth Than If Their Hearts Were Not So Big.

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity Successful Men Act As Though They Have Accomplished Or Are Enjoying Something. Soon It Becomes A Reality. Act, Look, Feel Successful, Conduct Yourself Accordingly, And You Will Be Amazed At The Positive Results.

The Most Natively Interesting Object To A Man Is His Own Personal Self And Its Fortunes. We Accordingly See That The Moment A Thing Becomes Connected With The Fortunes Of The Self, It Forthwith Becomes An Interesting Thing.

The Ideas Gained By Men Before They Are Twenty-five Are Practically The Only Ideas They Shall Have In Their Lives.

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

The Emotions Aren't Always Immediately Subject To Reason, But They Are Always Immediately Subject To Action.

The Mind, In Short, Works On The Data It Receives Very Much As A Sculptor Works On His Block Of Stone. In A Sense The Statue Stoodthere From Eternity. But There Were A Thousand Different Ones Beside It, And The Sculptor Alone Is To Thank For Having Extricated This One From The Rest.

The Total Possible Consciousness May Be Split Into Parts Which Co-exist But Mutually Ignore Each Other.

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.

We Have Nothing To Do But To Receive, Resting Absolutely Upon The Merit, Power, And Love Of Our Redeemer.

If Things Are Ever To Move Upward, Some One Must Take The First Step, And Assume The Risk Of It. No One Who Is Not Willing To Try Charity, To Try Non-resistance As The Saint Is Always Willing, Can Tell Whether These Methods Will Or Will Not Succeed.

To Give The Theory Plenty Of 'rope' And See If It Hangs Itself Eventually Is Better Tactics Than To Choke It Off At The Outset B Abstract Accusations Of Self-contradiction

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness.

When We Of The So-called Better Classes Are Scared As Men Were Never Scared In History At Material Ugliness And Hardship; When We Put Off Marriage Until Our House Can Be Artistic, And Quake At The Thought Of Having A Child Without A Bank-account And Doomed To Manual Labor, It Is Time For Thinking Men To Protest Against So Unmanly And Irreligious A State Of Opinion.

All Natural Goods Perish. Riches Take Wings; Fame Is A Breath; Love Is A Cheat; Youth And Health And Pleasure Vanish.

We, The Lineal Representatives Of The Successful Enactors Of One Scene Of Slaughter After Another, Must, Whatever More Pacific Virtues We May Also Possess, Still Carry About With Us, Ready At Any Moment To Burst Into Flame, The Smoldering And Sinister Traits Of Character By Means Of Which They Lived Through So Many Massacres, Harming Others, But Themselves Unharmed.

Science Can Tell Us What Exists; But To Compare The Worths, Both Of What Exists And Of What Does Not Exist, We Must Consult Not Science, But What Pascal Calls Our Heart.

A Man May Not Achieve Everything He Has Dreamed, But He Will Never Achieve Anything Great Without Having Dreamed It First.

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

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.

Every Way Of Classifying A Thing Is But A Way Of Handling It For Some Particular Purpose.

Objective Evidence And Certitude Are Doubtless Very Fine Ideals To Play With, But Where On This Moonlit And Dream-visited Planet Are They Found?

I Am Only A Philosopher, And There Is Only One Thing That A Philosopher Can Be Relied On To Do, And That Is, To Contradict Other Philosophers.

To Spend Life For Something Which Outlasts It.

You Can Alter Your Life By Altering The State Of Your Mind.

Don't Preach Too Much To Your Pupils Or Abound In Good Talk In The Abstract. Lie In Wait Rather For The Practical Opportunities, Be Prompt To Seize Those As They Pass, And Thus At One Operation Get Your Pupils Both To Think, To Feel, And To Do.

We Have Lost The Power Even Of Imagining What The Ancient Idealization Of Poverty Could Have Meant: The Liberation From Material Attachments, The Unbribed Soul, The Manlier Indifference, The Paying Our Way By What We Are And Not By What We Have, The Right To Fling Away Our Life At Any Moment Irresponsibly - The More Athletic Trim, In Short, The Moral Fighting Shape.

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Theoretically Possible.

The Whole Drift Of My Education Goes To Persuade Me That The World Of Our Present Consciousness Is Only One Out Of Many Worlds Of Consciousness That Exist.

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.

For The Moment, What We Attend To Is Reality.

Let Everything You Do Be Done As If It Makes A Difference.

Making A Difference

A Genius Is The Man In Whom You Are Least Likely To Find The Power Of Attending To Anything Insipid Or Distasteful In Itself. He Breaks His Engagements, Leaves His Letters Unanswered, Neglects His Family Duties Incorrigibly, Because He Is Powerless To Turn His Attention Down And Back From Those More Interesting Trains Of Imagery With Which His Genius Constantly Occupies His Mind.

[pragmatism's] Only Test Of Probable Truth Is What Works Best In The Way Of Leading Us, What Fits Every Part Of Life Best And Combines With The Collectivity Of Experience's Demands, Nothing Being Omitted.

The Last Peculiarity Of Consciousness To Which Attention Is To Be Drawn In This First Rough Description Of Its Stream Is That It Is Always Interested More In One Part Of Its Object Than In Another, And Welcomes And Rejects, Or Chooses, All The While It Thinks.

The Art Of Remembering Is The Art Of Thinking. When We Wish To Fix A New Thing In Either Our Own Mind Or A Pupil's, Our Conscious Effort Should Not Be So Much To Impress And Retain It As To Connect It With Something Else Already There. The Connecting Is The Thinking; And, If We Attend Clearly To The Connection, The Connected Thing Will Certainly Be Likely To Remain Within Recall.

Truth Lives, In Fact, For The Most Part On A Credit System

We Must Be Careful Not To Confuse Data With The Abstractions We Use To Analyse Them.

The 'i Think' Which Kant Said Must Be Able To Accompany All My Objects, Is The 'i Breathe' Which Actually Does Accompany Them.

Ideas Are So Much Flat Psychological Surface Unless Some Mirrored Matter Gives Them Cognitive Lustre. This Is Why As A Pragmatisti Have So Carefully Posited 'reality' Ab Initio, And Why Throughout My Whole Discussion, I Remain An Epistemologist Realist.

Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism, For Instance, Also Seems To Let God Evaporate Into Abstract Ideality. Not A Deity In Concreto, Not A Superhuman Person, But The Immanent Divinity In Things, The Essentially Spiritual Structure Of The Universe, Is The Object Of The Transcendentalist Cult. In That Address Of The Graduating Class At Divinity College In 1838 Which Made Emerson Famous, The Frank Expression Of This Worship Of Mere Abstract Laws Was What Made The Scandal Of The Performance.

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