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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.

-William James

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But Petitional Prayer Is

William James

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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.

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The One Who Thinks Over His Experiences Most, And Weaves Them Into Systematic Relations With Each Other, Will Be The One With The Best Memory.

If Merely 'feeling Good' Could Decide, Drunkenness Would Be The Supremely Valid Human Experience.

The Community Stagnates Without The Impulse Of The Individual. The Impulse Dies Away Without The Sympathy Of The Community.

Considering The Inner Fitness Of Things, One Would Rather Think That The Very First Act Of A Will Endowed With Freedom Should Be To Sustain The Belief In The Freedom Itself.

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Still Theoretically Possible ... Faith Is The Readiness To Act In A Cause The Prosperous Issue Of Which Is Not Certified To Us In Advance.

[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.

Seek Out That Particular Mental Attribute Which Makes You Feel Most Deeply And Vitally Alive.

We Must Frankly Confess, Then, Using Our Empirical Common Sense And Ordinary Practical Prejudices, That In The World That Actually Is, The Virtues Of Sympathy, Charity, And Non-resistance May Be, And Often Have Been, Manifested In Excess. ... You Will Agree To This In General, For In Spite Of The Gospel, In Spite Of Quakerism, In Spite Of Tolstoi, You Believe In Fighting Fire With Fire, In Shooting Down Usurpers, Locking Up Thieves, And Freezing Out Vagabonds And Swindlers.

The Perfect Stillness Of The Night Was Thrilled By A More Solemn Silence. The Darkness Held A Presence That Was All The More Felt Because It Was Not Seen. I Could Not Any More Have Doubted That He Was There Than That I Was. Indeed, I Felt Myself To Be, If Possible, The Less Real Of The Two.

Truth Is One Species Of Good, And Not, As Is Usually Supposed, A Category Distinct From Good, And Co-ordinate With It

The Aim Of Science Is Always To Reduce Complexity To Simplicity.

Strength Is A Facade For The Proud, Weakness Is A Mask For The Lazy.

(five) Thinkers Since Galileo, Each Informing His Successor Of What Discoveries His Own Lifetime Had Seen Achieved, Might Have Passed The Torch Of Science Into Our Hands As We Sit Here In This Room. Indeed, For The Matter Of That, An Audience Much Smaller Than The Present One, An Audience Of Some 5 Or 6 Score People, If Each Person In It Could Speak For His Own Generation, Would Carry Us Away To The Black Unknown Of The Human Species, To Days Without A Document Or Monument To Tell Their Tale.

A Man Of Sense Is Never Discouraged By Difficulties; He Redoubles His Industry And His Diligence, He Perseveres And Infallibly Prevails At Last.

So Our Self-feeling In This World Depends Entirely On What We Back Ourselves To Be And Do.

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

To Improve The Golden Moment Of Opportunity, And Catch The Good That Is Within Our Reach, Is The Great Art Of Life.

The Simplest Rudiment Of Mystical Experience Would Seem To Be That Deepened Sense Of The Significance Of A Maxim Or Formula Which Occasionally Sweeps Over One.

Mystical Experiences

Effort Is The One Strictly Undervalued And Original Contribution We Make To This World.

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

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can...in The Acquisition Of A New Habit, We Must Take Car To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided Initiative As Possible. Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life.

Only Necessity Understood, And Bondage To The Highest Is Identical With True Freedom.

Whatever Universe A Professor Believes In Must At Any Rate Be A Universe That Lends Itself To Lengthy Discourse. A Universe Definable In Two Sentences Is Something For Which The Professorial Intellect Has No Use. No Faith In Anything Of That Cheap Kind!

The Art Of Being Wise Is The Art Of Knowing What To Overlook.

One Of The Greatest Discoveries Of Our Time Is That A Man Can Alter The State Of Their Life By Altering The State Of Their Mind.

Lives Based On Having Are Less Free Than Lives Based Either On Doing Or Being.

Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

At Bottom, The Whole Concern Of Religion Is With The Manner Of Our Acceptance Of The Universe.

Religion, Whatever It Is, Is A Man's Total Reaction Upon Life.

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

But When All Is Said And Done, The Fact Remains That Some Teachers Have A Naturally Inspiring Presence And Can Make Their Exercises Interesting, Whilst Others Simply Cannot. And Psychology And General Pedagogy Here Confess Their Failure, And Hand Things Over To The Deeper Spring Of Human Personality To Conduct The Task.

Marvelous As May Be The Power Of My Dog To Understand My Moods, Deathless As His Affection And Fidelity, His Mental State Is As Unsolved A Mystery To Me As It Was To My Remotest Ancestor.

Habit Is Thus The Enormous Fly-wheel Of Society, Its Most Precious Conservative Agent. It Alone Is What Keeps Us All Within The Bounds Of Ordinance.

The Most Any One Can Do Is To Confess As Candidly As He Can The Grounds For The Faith That Is In Him, And Leave His Example To Work On Others As It May.

The True'to Put It Very Briefly, Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Thinking, Just As 'the Right' Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Behaving.

... No Bell In Us Tolls To Let Us Know For Certain When Truth Is In Our Grasp.

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

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.

If The Grace Of God Miraculously Operates, It Probably Operates Through The Subliminal Door.

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

For I Had Often Said That The Best Argument I Knew For An Immortal Life Was The Existence Of A Man Who Deserved One As Well As Child Did.

Pluralism Lets Things Really Exist In The Each-form Or Distributively. Monism Thinks That The All-form Or Collective-unit Form Is The Only Form That Is Rational.

The Total Mental Efficiency Of A Man Is The Resultant Of The Working Together Of All His Faculties. He Is Too Complex A Being For Any One Of Them To Have The Casting Vote. If Any One Of Them Do Have The Casting Vote, It Is More Likely To Be The Strength Of His Desire And Passion, The Strength Of The Interest He Takes In What Is Proposed. Concentration, Memory, Reasoning Power, Inventiveness, Excellence Of The Senses, All Are Subsidiary To This.

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

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.

In The Deepest Heart Of All Of Us There Is A Corner In Which The Ultimate Mystery Of Things Works Sadly.

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.

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

... The Intellect, Everywhere Invasive, Shows Everywhere Its Shallowing Effect.

For Morality Life Is A War, And The Service Of The Highest Is A Sort Of Cosmic Patriotism Which Also Calls For Volunteers.

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.

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

We Need Only In Cold Blood To Act As If The Thing In Question Were Real And It Will Infallibly End By Growing Into Such A Connection With Our Life That It Will Become Real.

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

Positive Images Of The Future Are A Powerful And Magnetic Force... They Draw Us On And Energize Us, Give Us Courage And Will To Take On Important Initiatives. Negative Images Of The Future Also Have A Magnetism. They Pull The Spirit Downward In The Path Of Despair.

A Man With No Philosophy In Him Is The Most Inauspicious And Unprofitable Of All Possible Social Mates.

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.

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.

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.

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill. But More Important Than That, Practicing This Philosophy Has Made A Different Person Of Me.

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

Making A Difference

The True Is The Name Of Whatever Proves Itself To Be Good In The Way Of Belief, And Good, Too, For Definite, Assignable Reasons.

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.

Habit Simplifies Our Movements, Makes Them Accurate, And Diminishes Fatigue.

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

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.

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.

Man Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

There Is A Stream, A Succession Of States, Or Waves, Or Fields (or Whatever You Please To Call Them), Of Knowledge, Of Feeling, Of Desire, Of Deliberation, Etc., That Constantly Pass And Repass, And That Constitute Our Inner Life.

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision, And For Whom The Lighting Of Every Cigar, The Drinking Of Every Cup, The Time Of Rising And Going To Bed Every Day, And The Beginning Of Every Bit Of Work, Are Subjects Of Express Volitional Deliberation.

I Myself Believe That The Evidence For God Lies Primarily In Inner Personal Experiences.

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 Only In The Lonely Emergencies Of Life That Our Creed Is Tested: Then Routine Maxims Fail, And We Fall Back On Our Gods.

There Is But One Cause Of Human Failure. And That Is Man's Lack Of Faith In His True Self.

Compared To What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Physical And Mental Resources. Stating The Thing Broadly, The Human Individual Thus Lives Far Within His Limits. He Possesses Power Of Various Sorts Which He Habitually Fails To Use.

When You Have Broken The Reality Into Concepts You Never Can Reconstruct It In Its Wholeness.

Round About The Accredited And Orderly Facts Of Every Science There Ever Floats A Sort Of Dust-cloud Of Exceptional Observations, Of Occurrences Minute And Irregular And Seldom Met With, Which It Always Proves More Easy To Ignore Than To Attend To... Anyone Will Renovate His Science Who Will Steadily Look After The Irregular Phenomena, And When Science Is Renewed, Its New Formulas Often Have More Of The Voice Of The Exceptions In Them Than Of What Were Supposed To Be The Rules.

A Remarkable Parallel, Which I Think Has Never Been Noticed, Obtains Between The Facts Of Social Evolution On The One Hand, And Of Zological Evolution As Expounded By Mr. Darwin On The Other.

Much Of What We Call Evil Is Due Entirely To The Way Men Take The Phenomenon. It Can So Often Be Converted Into A Bracing And Tonic Good By A Simple Change Of The Sufferer's Inner Attitude From One Of Fear To One Of Fight; Its String Can So Often Depart And Turn Into A Relish When, After Vainly Seeking To Shun It, We Agree To Face About And Bear It.

Let Anyone Try, I Will Not Say To Arrest, But To Notice Or To Attend To, The Present Moment Of Time. One Of The Most Baffling Experiences Occurs. Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

Between What A Man Calls Me And What He Simply Calls Mine The Line Is Difficult To Draw. We Feel And Act About Certain Things That Are Ours Very Much As We Feel And Act About Ourselves.

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.

It Is Astonishing How Many Mental Operations We Can Explain When We Have Once Grasped The Principles Of Association

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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

The Instant Field Of The Present Is At All Times What I Call The 'pure' Experience. It Is Only Virtually Or Potentially Either Object Or Subject As Yet.

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.

... I Am The Same Personal Being Who In Old Times Upon The Earth Had Those Experiences.

Feed The Growing Human Being, Feed Him With The Sort Of Experience For Which From Year To Year He Shows A Natural Craving, And He Will Develop In Adult Life A Sounder Sort Of Mental Tissue, Even Though He May Seem To Be 'wasting' A Great Deal Of His Growing Time, In The Eyes Of Those For Whom The Only Channels Of Learning Are Books And Verbally Communicated Information.

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

The Deepest Principle In Human Nature Is The Craving To Be Appreciated.

Success Plus Self-esteem Equals Pretensions.

Congratulations

The Intellectual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of Conceptual Order For The Perceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

Touch Is The Alpha And Omega Of Affection.

Alpha And Omega

It Is Only The Fundamental Conceptions Of Psychology Which Are Of Real Value To A Teacher.

When Two Minds Of A High Order, Interested In Kindred Subjects, Come Together, Their Conversation Is Chiefly Remarkable For The Summariness Of Its Allusions And The Rapidity Of Its Transitions. Before One Of Them Is Half Through A Sentence The Other Knows His Meaning And Replies. ... His Mental Lungs Breathe More Deeply, In An Atmosphere More Broad And Vast.

The Most Immutable Barrier In Nature Is Between One Man's Thoughts And Another's.

The Truth Remains That, After Adolescence Has Begun, "words, Words, Words," Must Constitute A Large Part, And An Always Larger Part As Life Advances, Of What The Human Being Has To Learn.

Impulse Without Reason Is Enough, And Reason Without Impulse Is A Poor Makeshift.

He Who Refuses To Embrace A Unique Opportunity Loses The Prize As Surely As If He Had Failed.

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.

Each Of Us Literally Chooses, By His Way Of Attending To Things, What Sort Of Universe He Shall Appear To Himself To Inhabit.

All That We Need Explicitly To Note Is That, The More The Passive Attention Is Relied On, By Keeping The Material Interesting; And The Less The Kind Of Attention Requiring Effort Is Appealed To; The More Smoothly And Pleasantly The Classroom Work Goes On.

Our Life Is Always Deeper Than We Know, Is Always More Divine Than It Seems, And Hence We Are Able To Survive Degradations And Despairs Which Otherwise Must Engulf Us.

This Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It.

You Make A Great, Very Great Mistake, If You Think That Psychology, Being The Science Of The Mind's Laws, Is Something From Which You Can Deduce Definite Programmes And Schemes And Methods Of Instruction For Immediate Schoolroom Use.

Emotional Occasions, Especially Violent Ones, Are Extremely Potent In Precipitating Mental Rearrangements. The Sudden And Explosive Ways In Which Love, Jealousy, Guilt, Fear, Remorse, Or Anger Can Seize Upon One Are Known To Everybody. . . . And Emotions That Come In This Explosive Way Seldom Leave Things As They Found Them.

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, And Never To Be Undone. Every Smallest Stroke Of Virtue Or Of Vice Leaves Its Never So Little Scar. ...nothing We Ever Do Is, In Strict Scientific Literalness, Wiped Out.

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

To Begin With, Our Knowledge Grows In Spots. The Spots May Be Large Or Small, But The Knowledge Ever Grows All Over... What You First Gain From Them Is Probably A Small Amount Of New Information, A Few New Definitions, Or Distinctions, Or Points Of View. But While These Special Ideas Are Being Added, The Rest Of Your Knowledge Stands Still, And Only Gradually Will You 'line Up' Your Previous Opinions With The Novelties I Am Trying To Instil, And Modify To Some Slight Degree Their Mass.

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.

Even If Matter Could Do Every Outward Thing That God Does, The Idea Of It Would Not Work As Satisfactorily, Because The Chief Callfor A God On Modern Men's Part Is For A Being Who Will Inwardly Recognize Them And Judge Them Sympathetically. Matter Disappoints This Craving Of Our Ego, So God Remains For Most Men The Truer Hypothesis, And Indeed Remains So For Definite Pragmatic Reasons.

If You Wish To Upset The Law That All Crows Are Black, You Mustn't Seek To Show That No Crows Are; It Is Enough If You Prove One Single Crow To Be White.

It Is True That So Far As Wealth Gives Time For Ideal Ends And Exercise To Ideal Energies, Wealth Is Better Than Poverty And Ought To Be Chosen. But Wealth Does This In Only A Portion Of The Actual Cases. Elsewhere The Desire To Gain Wealth And The Fear To Lose It Are Our Chief Breeders Of Cowardice And Propagators Of Corruption. There Must Be Thousands Of Conjunctures In Which A Wealth-bound Man Must Be A Slave, Whilst A Man For Whom Poverty Has No Terrors Becomes A Freeman.

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

Romeo Wants Juliet As The Filings Want The Magnet; And If No Obstacles Intervene He Moves Towards Her By As Straight A Line As They. But Romeo And Juliet, If A Wall Be Built Between Them, Do Not Remain Idiotically Pressing Their Faces Against Its Opposite Sides Like The Magnet And The Filings With The Card. Romeo Soon Finds A Circuitous Way, By Scaling The Wall Or Otherwise, Of Touching Juliet's Lips Directly. With The Filings The Path Is Fixed; Whether It Reaches The End Depends On Accidents. With The Lover It Is The End Which Is Fixed, The Path May Be Modified Indefinitely.

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.

To Know Psychology, Therefore, Is Absolutely No Guarantee That We Shall Be Good Teacher.

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

Knowledge About Life Is One Thing; Effective Occupation Of A Place In Life, With Its Dynamic Currents Passing Through Your Being, Is Another.

Let Sanguine Healthy-mindedness Do Its Best With Its Strange Power Of Living In The Moment And Ignoring And Forgetting, Still The Evil Background Is Really There To Be Thought Of, And The Skull Will Grin In At The Banquet.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

How Can The Moribund Old Man Reason Back To Himself The Romance, The Mystery, The Imminence Of Great Things With Which Our Old Earth Tingled For Him In The Days When He Was Young And Well?

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

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 Self-same Atoms Which, Chaotically Dispersed, Made The Nebula, Now, Jammed And Temporarily Caught In Peculiar Positions, Form Our Brains; And The 'evolution' Of Brains, If Understood, Would Be Simply The Account Of How The Atoms Came To Be So Caught And Jammed.

Religion . . . Shall Mean For Us The Feelings, Acts And Experiences Of Individual Men In Their Solitude.

The Drunken Consciousness Is One Bit Of The Mystic Consciousness, And Our Total Opinion Of It Must Find Its Place In Our Opinion Of That Larger Whole.

A New Opinion Counts As True Just In Proportion As It Gratifies The Individual's Desire To Assimilate The Novel In His Experience To His Beliefs In Stock

O My Bergson, You Are A Magician, And Your Book Is A Marvel, A Real Wonder In The History Of Philosophy . . . In Finishing It I Found . . . Such A Flavor Of Persistent Euphony, As Of A Rich River That Never Foamed Or Ran Thin, But Steadily And Firmly Proceeded With Its Banks Full To The Brim.

Better Risk Loss Of Truth Than Chance Of Error--that Is Your Faith-vetoer's Exact Position. He Is Actively Playing His Stake As Much As The Believer Is; He Is Backing The Field Against The Religious Hypothesis, Just As The Believer Is Backing The Religious Hypothesis Against The Field.

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

Habit Is The Enormous Flywheel Of Society, Its Most Precious Conservative Agent. There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision. Full Half The Time Of Such A Man Goes To The Deciding, Or Regretting, Of Matters Which Ought To Be So Ingrained In Him As Practically Not To Exist For His Consciousness At All.

Every Man Who Possibly Can Should Force Himself To A Holiday Of A Full Month In A Year, Whether He Feels Like Taking It Or Not.

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.

Volition . . . Takes Place Only When There Are A Number Of Conflicting Systems Of Ideas, And Depends On Our Having A Complex Field Of Consciousness.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

The Absolute Things, The Last Things, The Overlapping Things, Are The Truly Philosophic Concerns; All Superior Minds Feel Seriously About Them, And The Mind With The Shortest Views Is Simply The Mind Of The More Shallow Man.

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.

Seize The Very First Possible Opportunity To Act On Every Resolution You Make, And On Every Emotional Prompting You May Experience In The Direction Of The Habits You Aspire To Gain.

Most People Never Run Far Enough On Their First Wind To Find Out They've Got A Second.

Inspirational Sports

All Our Scientific And Philosophic Ideals Are Altars To Unknown Gods.

When Happiness Is Actually In Possession, The Thought Of Evil Can No More Acquire The Feeling Of Reality Than The Thought Of Good Can Gain Reality When Melancholy Rules. To The Man Actively Happy, From Whatever Cause, Evil Simply Cannot Then And There Be Believed In.

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

The Instinct Of Ownership Is Fundamental In Man's Nature.

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

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.

... 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.

Men Habitually Use Only A Small Part Of The Power Which They Actually Possess.

Your Hopes, Dreams And Aspirations Are Legitimate. They Are Trying To Take You Airborne, Above The Clouds, Above The Storms, If You Only Let Them.

The Good Or Bad Is Not In The Circumstance, But Only In The Mind...that Encounters It.

Experience, As We Know, Has A Way Of Boiling Over, And Making Us Correct Our Present Formulas.

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.

What Interest, Zest, Or Excitement Can There Be In Achieving The Right Way, Unless We Are Enabled To Feel That The Wrong Way Is Also A Possible And A Natural Way, Nay, More, A Menacing And An Imminent Way? And What Sense Can There Be In Condemning Ourselves For Taking The Wrong Way, Unless We Need Have Done Nothing Of The Sort, Unless The Right Way Was Open To Us As Well? I Cannot Understand The Willingness To Act, No Matter How We Feel, Without The Belief That Acts Are Really Good And Bad.

The Great Use Of Life Is To Spend It For Something That Will Outlast It.

If You Care Enough For A Result, You Will Most Certainly Attain It.

To Be Radical, An Empiricism Must Neither Admit Into Its Constructions Any Element That Is Not Directly Experienced, Nor Exclude From Them Any Element That Is Directly Experienced.

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

General Scepticism Is The Live Mental Attitude Of Refusing To Conclude. It Is A Permanent Torpor Of The Will, Renewing Itself In Detail Towards Each Successive Thesis That Offers, And You Can No More Kill It Off By Logic Than You Can Kill Off Obstinacy Or Practical Joking.

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

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.

If There Is Aught Of Good In The Style, It Is The Result Of Ceaseless Toil In Rewriting. Everything Comes Out Wrong With Me At First; But When Once Objectified In A Crude Shape, I Can Torture And Poke And Scrape And Pat It Till It Offends Me No More.

Truth Happens To An Idea. It Becomes True, Is Made True By Events. Its Verity Is In Fact An Event, A Process: The Process Namely Of Its Verifying Itself, Its Veri-fication. Its Validity Is The Process Of Its Valid-ation.

How To Gain, How To Keep, How To Recover Happiness Is In Fact For Most Men At All Times The Secret Motive Of All They Do, And Of All They Are Willing To Endure.

The World We See That Seems So Insane Is The Result Of A Belief System That Is Not Working. To Perceive The World Differently, We Must Be Willing To Change Our Belief System, Let The Past Slip Away, Expand Our Sense Of Now, And Dissolve The Fear In Our Minds.

The Same Is True Of Love, And The Instinctive Desire To Please Those Whom We Love. The Teacher Who Succeeds In Getting Herself Loved By The Pupils Will Obtain Results Which One Of A More Forbidding Temperament Finds It Impossible To Secure.

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

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

As A Rule Reading Fiction Is As Hard To Me As Trying To Hit A Target By Hurling Feathers At It. I Need Resistance To Celebrate!

If, Then, You Wish To Insure The Interest Of Your Pupils, There Is Only One Way To Do It; And That Is To Make Certain That They Have Something In Their Minds To Attend With, When You Begin To Talk. That Something Can Consist In Nothing But A Previous Lot Of Ideas Already Interesting In Themselves, And Of Such A Nature That The Incoming Novel Objects Which You Present Can Dovetail Into Them And Form With Them Some Kind Of A Logically Associated Or Systematic Whole.

The Greatest Enemy Of Any One Of Our Truths May Be The Rest Of Our Truths.

I Originally Studied Medicine In Order To Be A Physiologist, But I Drifted Into Psychology And Philosophy From A Sort Of Fatality. I Never Had Any Philosophic Instruction, The First Lecture On Psychology I Ever Heard Being The First I Ever Gave.

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

Acceptance Of What Has Happened Is The First Step To Overcoming The Consequences Of Any Misfortune.

The General Law Is That No Mental Modification Ever Occurs Which Is Not Accompanied Or Followed By A Bodily Change.

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.

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

Intellectualism' Is The Belief That Our Mind Comes Upon A World Complete In Itself, And Has The Duty Of Ascertaining Its Contents; But Has No Power Of Re-determining Its Character, For That Is Already Given.

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

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

Making A Difference

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

Act In Earnest And You Will Become Earnest In All You Do.

Give Your Dreams All You've Got, And You'll Be Amazed At The Energy That Comes Out Of You.

If Any Organism Fails To Fulfill Its Potentialities, It Becomes Sick.

Whilst Part Of What We Perceive Comes Through Our Senses From The Object Before Us, Another Part (and It May Be The Larger Part) Always Comes Out Of Our Own Mind.

You May Not Get Everything You Dream About, But You Will Never Get Anything You Don't Dream About.

Social Evolution Is A Resultant Of The Interaction Of Two Wholly Distinct Factors: The Individual ... Bearing All The Power Of Initiative And Origination In His Hands; And, Second, The Social Environment With Its Power Of Adopting Or Rejecting Both Him And His Gifts. Both Factors Are Essential To Change. The Community Stagnates Without The Impulse Of The Individual. The Impulse Dies Away Without The Sympathy Of The Community.

When You Have To Make A Choice And Don't Make It, That Is In Itself A Choice.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

In The Practical Use Of Our Intellect, Forgetting Is As Important As Remembering.

Ninety-nine Hundredths Or, Possibly, Nine Hundred And Ninety-nine Thousandths Of Our Activity Is Purely Automatic And Habitual, From Our Rising In The Morning To Our Lying Down Each Night.

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

Man Is Essentially The Imitative Animal. His Whole Educabilityand In Fact The Whole History Of Civilization Depend On This Trait, Which His Strong Tendencies To Rivalry, Jealousy, And Acquisitiveness Reinforce.

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists.

Real Servants Don't Try To Use God For Their Purposes. They Let God Use Them For His Purposes.

Instinct Leads, Logic Does But Follow.

The Faculty Of Voluntarily Bringing Back A Wandering Attention, Over And Over Again, Is The Very Root Of Judgment, Character, And Will... An Education Which Should Improve This Faculty Would Be The Education Par Excellence.

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