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Creatures Extremely Low In The Intellectual Scale May Have Conception. All That Is Required Is That They Should Recognize The Same Experience Again. A Polyp Would Be A Conceptual Thinker If A Feeling Of 'hello! Thingumbob Again!' Ever Flitted Through Its Mind.

-William James

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Creatures Extremely Low In

William James

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Creatures Extremely Low In The Intellectual Scale May Have Conception. All That Is Required Is That They Should Recognize The Same Experience Again. A Polyp Would Be A Conceptual Thinker If A Feeling Of 'hello! Thingumbob Again!' Ever Flitted Through Its Mind.

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Happiness Comes Of The Capacity To Feel Deeply, To Enjoy Simply, To Think Freely, To Risk Life, To Be Needed. Which Give Happiness. Thomas Jefferson We Never Enjoy Perfect Happiness; Our Most Fortunate Successes Are Mingled With Sadness; Some Anxieties Always Perplex The Reality Of Our Satisfaction.

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.

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

Thoughts Become Perception, Perception Becomes Reality. Alter Your Thoughts, Alter Your Reality.

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

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.

Consciousness... Does Not Appear To Itself Chopped Up In Bits. Such Words As 'chain' Or 'train' Do Not Describe It Fitly As It Presents Itself In The First Instance. It Is Nothing Jointed; It Flows. A 'river' Or A 'stream' Are The Metaphors By Which It Is Most Naturally Described. In Talking Of It Hereafter, Let Us Call It The Stream Of Thought, Of Consciousness, Or Of Subjective Life. Source Of The Expression 'stream Of Consciousness'.

One Hearty Laugh Together Will Bring Enemies Into A Closer Communion Of Heart Than Hours Spent On Both Sides In Inward Wrestling With The Mental Demon Of Uncharitable Feeling.

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.

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

It Is Well For The World That In Most Of Us, By The Age Of Thirty, The Character Has Set Like Plaster, And Will Never Soften Again.

Man Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

The Minute A Man Ceases To Grow, No Matter What His Years, That Minute He Begins To Be Old.

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

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being. They Make Very Small Use Of Their Possible Consciousness, And Of Their Soul's Resources In General, Much Like A Man Who, Out Of His Whole Bodily Organism, Should Get Into A Habit Of Using And Moving Only His Little Finger.

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

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 Further Limits Of Our Being Plunge, It Seems To Me, Into An Altogether Other Dimension Of Existence From The Sensible And Merely Understandable World. Name It The Mystical Region, Or The Supernatural Region, Whichever You Choose. So Far As Our Ideal Impulses Originate In This Region (and Most Of Them Do Originate In It, For We Find Them Possessing Us In A Way For Which We Cannot Articulately Account), We Belong To It In A More Intimate Sense Than That In Which We Belong To The Visible World, For We Belong In The Most Intimate Sense Wherever Our Ideals Belong.

[religion Is] The Attempt To Be In Harmony With An Unseen Order Of Things.

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.

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.

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

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

So Far War Has Been The Only Force That Can Discipline A Whole Community, And Until An Equivalent Discipline Is Organized, I Believe That War Must Have Its Way.

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

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

Language Is The Most Imperfect And Expensive Means Yet Discovered For Communicating Thought.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Belief In Free-will Is Not In The Least Incompatible With The Belief In Providence, Provided You Do Not Restrict The Providence To Fulminating Nothing But Fatal Decrees.

We Have Grown Literally Afraid To Be Poor. We Despise Anyone Who Elects To Be Poor In Order To Simplify And Save His Inner Life. If He Does Not Join The General Scramble And Pant With The Money-making Street, We Deem Him Spiritless And Lacking In Ambition

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

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

Equality Is Attainable As Long As You Are Part Of The Majority.

Philosophy Is At Once The Most Sublime And The Most Trivial Of Human Pursuits.

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

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

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.

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

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

True Ideas Lead Us Into Useful Verbal And Conceptual Quarters As Well As Directly Up To Useful Sensible Termini. They Lead To Consistency, Stability And Flowing Human Intercourse.

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.

The Teacher's Prime Concern Should Be To Ingrain Into The Pupil That Assortment Of Habits That Shall Be Most Useful To Him Throughout Life. Education Is For Behavior, And Habits Are The Stuff Of Which Behavior Consists.

Our Belief At The Beginning Of A Doubtful Undertaking Is The One Thing That Assures The Successful Outcome Of Any Venture.

In Order To Disprove The Assertion That All Crows Are Black, One White Crow Is Sufficient.

...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.

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.

If This Life Is Not A Real Fight, In Which Something Is Eternally Gained For The Universe By Success, It Is No Better Than A Game Of Private Theatricals From Which One May Withdraw At Will. But It Feels Like A Real Fight.

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

Millions Of Items In The Outward Order Are Present To My Senses Which Never Properly Enter Into My Experience. Why? Because They Have No Interest For Me. My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To. Only Those Items Which I Notice Shape My Mind --without Selective Interest, Experience Is An Utter Chaos.

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.

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

Do Every Day Or Two Something For No Other Reason Than Its Difficulty.

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.

What Every Genuine Philosopher (every Genuine Man, In Fact) Craves Most Is Praise Although The Philosophers Generally Call It Recognition!

Rewards And Recognition

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

To Be Fertile In Hypotheses Is The First Perquisite Of Creativity And To Be Willing To Throw Them Away The Moment Experience Contradicts Them Is The Next.

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

An Idea Will Infect Another With Its Own Emotional Interest When They Have Become Both Associated Together Into Any Sort Of A Mental Total.

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

A Chain Is No Stronger Than Its Weakest Link, And Life Is After All A Chain.

True Is The Name For Whatever Idea Starts The Verification Process, Useful Is The Name For Its Completed Function In Experience

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

Is Life Worth Living? It All Depends On The Liver.

I Take It That No Man Is Educated Who Has Never Dallied With The Thought Of Suicide.

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

We All Have A Lifelong Habit Of Inferiority To Our Full Self..."

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

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

The Difference Between The First And Second-best Things In Art Absolutely Seems To Escape Verbal Definition -- It Is A Matter Of A Hair, A Shade, An Inward Quiver Of Some Kind -- Yet What Miles Away In The Point Of Preciousness!

We Are Stereotyped Creatures, Imitators And Copiers Of Our Past Selves.

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

There Must Always Be A Discrepncy Between Concepts And Reality, Because The Former Are Static And Discontinuous While The Latter Is Dynamic And Flowing

Creatures Extremely Low In The Intellectual Scale May Have Conception. All That Is Required Is That They Should Recognize The Same Experience Again. A Polyp Would Be A Conceptual Thinker If A Feeling Of 'hello! Thingumbob Again!' Ever Flitted Through Its Mind.

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.

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.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

For The Moment, What We Attend To Is Reality.

A New Idea Is First Condemned As Ridiculous And Then Dismissed As Trivial, Until Finally, It Becomes What Everybody Knows.

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

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.

Our Ideas Must Agree With Realities, Be Such Realities Concrete Or Abstract, Be They Facts Or Be They Principles, Under Penalty Of Endless Inconsistency And Frustration.

The Work That Leads To A Doctor's Degree Is A Constant Temptation To Sacrifice One's Growth As A Man To One's Growth As A Specialist.

Mankind's Common Instinct For Reality Has Always Held The World To Be Essentially A Theatre For Heroism. In Heroism, We Feel, Life's Supreme Mystery Is Hidden. We Tolerate No One Who Has No Capacity Whatever For It In Any Direction. On The Other Hand, No Matter What A Man's Frailties Otherwise May Be, If He Be Willing To Risk Death, And Still More If He Suffer It Heroically, In The Service He Has Chosen, The Fact Consecrates Him Forever.

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.

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.

An Unlearned Carpenter Of My Acquaintance Once Said In My Hearing: "there Is Very Little Difference Between One Man And Another; But What Little There Is, Is Very Important." This Distinction Seems To Me To Go To The Root Of The Matter.

Modern War Is So Expensive That We Feel Trade To Be A Better Avenue To Plunder; But Modern Man Inherits All The Innate Pugnacity And All The Love Of Glory Of His Ancestors.

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

... 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.

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.

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.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

If You Want To Change Your Life, Do It Flamboyantly And Start Immediately.

Changing Your Life

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

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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.

To Suggest Personal Will And Effort To One All Sicklied O'er With The Sense Of Irremediable Impotence Is To Suggest The Most Impossible Of Things. What He Craves Is To Be Consoled In His Very Powerlessness, To Feel That The Spirit Of The Universe Recognizes And Secures Him, All Decaying And Failing As He Is.

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.

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort.

Effort And Hard Work

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

What The Whole Community Comes To Believe In Grasps The Individual As In A Vise.

Modern Man . . . Has Not Ceased To Be Credulous . . . The Need To Believe Haunts Him.

[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.

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.

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

The Highest Flights Of Charity, Devotion, Trust, Patience, Bravery To Which The Wings Of Human Nature Have Spread Themselves, Have Been Flown For Religious Ideals.

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

When Thoughts Do Not Neutralize An Undesirable Emotion, Action Will.

Keep The Faculty Of Effort Alive In You By A Little Gratuitous Exercise Every Day.

We With Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea... The Islands Also Hang Together Through The Ocean's Bottom.

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

The Mind Of Your Own Enemy, The Pupil, Is Working Away From You, As Keenly And Eagerly As Is The Mind Of The Commander On The Other Side From The Scientific General. Just What The Respective Enemies Want And Think, And What They Know Or Do Not Know, Are As Hard Things For The Teachers As For The General To Find Out.

There Is A Voice Inside Which Speaks And Says, "this Is The Real Me!"

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.

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

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

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

Fear Of Life In One Form Or Another Is The Great Thing To Exorcise.

So You See That The Process Of Education, Taken In A Large Way, May Be Described As Nothing But The Process Of Acquiring Ideas Or Conceptions, The Best Educated Mind Being The Mind Which Has The Largest Stock Of Them, Ready To Meet The Largest Possible Variety Of The Emergencies Of Life. The Lack Of Education Means Only The Failure To Have Acquired Them, And The Consequent Liability To Be 'floored' And 'rattled' In The Vicissitudes Of Experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If You Can Change Your Mind, You Can Change Your Life.

All Natural Happiness Thus Seems Infected With A Contradiction. The Breath Of The Sepulchre Surrounds It.

There Are Two Lives, The Natural And The Spiritual, And We Must Lose The One Before We Can Participate In The Other.

Failure, Then, Failure! So The World Stamps Us At Every Turn. We Strew It With Our Blunders, Our Misdeeds, Our Lost Opportunities, With All The Memorials Of Our Inadequacy To Our Vocation. And With What A Damning Emphasis Does It Then Blot Us Out! No Easy Fine, No Mere Apology Or Formal Expiation, Will Satisfy The World's Demands, But Every Pound Of Flesh Exacted Is Soaked With All Its Blood. The Subtlest Forms Of Suffering Known To Man Are Connected With The Poisonous Humiliations Incidental To These Results.

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.

... 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.

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

If Theological Ideas Prove To Have A Value For Concrete Life, They Will Be True, For Pragmatism, In The Sense Of Being Good For So Much. How Much More They Are True, Will Depend Entirely On Their Relations To The Other Truths That Also Have To Be Acknowledged.

To Change One's Life: A. Start Immediately B. B. Do It Flamboyantly C. No Exceptions Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted.

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.

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

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.

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

Human Beings Can Alter Their Lives By Altering Their Attitudes Of Mind.

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 Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

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.

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

With No Attempt There Can Be No Failure; With No Failure No Humiliation.

Pretend What We May, The Whole Man Within Us Is At Work When We Form Our Philosophical Opinions.

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.

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

Few People Have Definitely Articulated Philosophies Of Their Own. But Almost Everyone Has His Own Peculiar Sense Of A Certain Total Character In The Universe, And Of The Inadequacy Of Fully To Match It [to] The Peculiar Systems That He Knows.

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.

You Perceive Now, My Friends, What Your General Or Abstract Duty Is As Teachers. Although You Have To Generate In Your Pupils A Large Stock Of Ideas, Any One Of Which May Be Inhibitory, Yet You Must Also See To It That No Habitual Hesitancy Or Paralysis Of The Will Ensues, And That The Pupil Still Retains His Power Of Vigorous Action.

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.

The Suspicion Is In The Air Nowadays That The Superiority Of One Of Our Formulas To Another May Not Consist So Much In Its Literal 'objectivity,' As In Subjective Qualities Like Its Usefulness, Its 'elegance,' Or Its Congruity With Our Residual Beliefs

We Divert Our Attention From Disease And Death As Much As We Can; The Slaughterhouses Are Huddled Out Of Sight And Never Mentioned, So That The World We Recognize Officially In Literature And In Society Is A Poetic Fiction Far Handsomer, Cleaner And Better Than The World That Really Is.

Disease And Death

The Bottom Of Being Is Left Logically Opaque To Us, A Datum In The Strict Sense Of The Word, Something We Simply Come Upon And Find, And About Which (if We Wish To Act) We Should Pause And Wonder As Little As Possible. In This Confession Lies The Lasting Truth Of Empiricism.

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.

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

Everybody Should Do At Least Two Things Each Day That He Hates To Do, Just For Practice.

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.

The Ultimate Test Of What A Truth Means Is The Conduct It Dictates Or Inspires.

The Entire Routine Of Our Memorized Acquisitions, For Example, Is A Consequence Of Nothing But The Law Of Contiguity. The Words Of A Poem, The Formulas Of Trigonometry, The Facts Of History, The Properties Of Material Things, Are All Known To Us As Definite Systems Or Groups Of Objects Which Cohere In An Order Fixed By Innumerable Iterations, And Of Which Any One Part Reminds Us Of The Others.

There Is No Being Capable Of A Spiritual Life Who Does Not Have Within Him A Jungle. Where The Wolf Constantly Howls And The Obscene Bird Of Night Chatters Endlessly.

The Word 'cause' Is An Altar To An Unknown God.

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.

Divinity Lies All Around Us, But Society Remains Too Hidebound To Accept That Fact...the Mother Sea And The Fountain-head Of All Religions Lies In The Mystical Experiences Of The Individual.

Mystical Experiences

If You Only Care Enough For A Result, You Will Almost Certainly Attain It. Only You Must, Then, Really Wish These Things, And Wish Them Exclusively, And Not Wish At The Same Time A Hundred Other Incompatible Things Just As Strongly.

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.

Could The Young But Realize How Soon They Will Become Mere Walking Bundles Of Habits, They Would Give More Heed To Their Conduct While In The Plastic State.

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.

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.

I Have Often Thought The Best Way To Define A Man's Character Would Be To Seek Out The Particular Mental Or Moral Attitude In Which, When It Comes Upon Him, He Felt Himself Most Deeply And Intensely Active And Alive. At Such Moments There Is A Voice Inside Which Speaks And Says: This Is The Real Me!.

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

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

Man Lives By Habits Indeed, But What He Lives For Is Thrill And Excitements. ... From Time Immemorial War Has Been ... The Supremely Thrilling Excitement.

A Little Cooling Down Of Animal Excitability And Instinct, A Little Loss Of Animal Toughness, A Little Irritable Weakness And Descent Of The Pain-threshold, Will Bring The Worm At The Core Of All Our Usual Springs Of Delight Into Full View, And Turn Us Into Melancholy Metaphysicians.

In Teaching, You Must Simply Work Your Pupil Into Such A State Of Interest In What You Are Going To Teach Him That Every Other Object Of Attention Is Banished From His Mind; Then Reveal It To Him So Impressively That He Will Remember The Occasion To His Dying Day; And Finally Fill Him With Devouring Curiosity To Know What The Next Steps In Connection With The Subject Are.

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.

In Modern Eyes, Precious Though Wars May Be They Must Not Be Waged Solely For The Sake Of The Ideal Harvest. Only When Forced Upon One, Is A War Now Thought Permissible.

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

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

Nature In Her Unfathomable Designs Had Mixed Us Of Clay And Flame, Of Brain And Mind, That The Two Things Hang Indubitably Together And Determine Each Other's Being But How Or Why, No Mortal May Ever Know.

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

Men's Activities Are Occupied Into Ways -- In Grappling With External Circumstances And In Striving To Set Things At One In Their Own Topsy-turvy Mind.

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge. There Is No More Contemptible Type Of Human Character Than That Of The Nerveless Sentimentalist And Dreamer, Who Spends His Life In A Weltering Sea Of Sensibility And Emotion, But Who Never Does A Manly Concrete Deed.

We Hear In These Days Of Scientific Enlightenment A Great Deal Of Discussion About The Efficacy Of Prayer. Many Reasons Are Given Why We Should Not Pray. Others Give Reasons Why We Should Pray. Very Little Is Said Of The Reason We Do Pray. The Reason Is Simple: We Pray Because We Cannot Help Praying.

All Our Life, So Far As It Has Definite Form, Is But A Mass Of Habits.

On Pragmatistic Principles, If The Hypothesis Of God Works Satisfactorily In The Widest Sense Of The Word, It Is True.

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.

Cramming Seeks To Stamp Things In By Intense Application Immediately Before The Ordeal. But A Thing Thus Learned Can Form But Few Associations.

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.

The World Is All The Richer For Having A Devil In It, So Long As We Keep Our Foot Upon His Neck.

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.

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

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

We Believe As Much As We Can. We Would Believe Everything If We Could.

Most Unhappiness Is Caused Because People Listen To Themselves... Instead Of Talking To Themselves.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

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.

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.

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