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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.

-William James

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If, Then, You Wish

William James

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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.

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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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Do Something Everyday For No Other Reason Than You Would Rather Not Do It, So That When The Hour Of Dire Need Draws Nigh, It May Find You Not Unnerved And Untrained To Stand The Test.

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.

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

I Don't See How An Epigram, Being A Bolt From The Blue, With No Introduction Or Cue, Ever Gets Itself Writ.

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.

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.

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

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

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

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.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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

It Is Art That Makes Life, And I Know Of No Substitute Whatsoever For The Force And Beauty Of Its Process.

Truth, As Any Dictionary Will Tell You, Is A Property Of Certain Of Our Ideas. It Means Their Agreement, As Falsity Means Their Disagreement, With Reality.

An Impression Which Simply Flows In At The Pupil's Eyes Or Ears And In No Way Modifies His Active Life, Is An Impression Gone To Waste. It Is Physiologically Incomplete... Its Motor Consequences Are What Clinch It.

The Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

Life Feels Like A Real Fight - As If There Were Something Really Wild In The Universe Which We, With All Our Idealities And Faithfulnesses, Are Needed To Redeem.

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.

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.

What Do Believers In The Absolute Mean By Saving That Their Belief Affords Them Comfort? They Mean That Since In The Absolute Finite Evil Is ‘overruled’ Already, We May, Therefore, Whenever We Wish, Treat The Temporal As If It Were Potentially The Eternal, Be Sure That We Can Trust Its Outcome, And, Without Sin, Dismiss Our Fear And Drop The Worry Of Our Finite Responsibility. In Short, They Mean That We Have A Right Ever And Anon To Take A Moral Holiday, To Let The World Wag In Its Own Way, Feeling That Its Issues Are In Better Hands Than Ours And Are None Of Our Business.

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

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.

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.

The States Of Consciousness Are All That Psychology Needs To Do Her Work With. Metaphysics Or Theology May Prove The Soul To Exist; But For Psychology The Hypothesis Of Such A Substantial Principle Of Unity Is Superfluous.

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.

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

A Winner's Attitude: It May Be Difficult, But It's Possible. A Loser's Attitude: It May Be Possible, But It's Too Difficult.

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

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

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.

No Living Person Is Sunk So Low As Not To Be Imitated By Somebody.

I Wished By Treating Psychology Like A Natural Science, To Help Her Become One.

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

The Attitude Of Unhappiness Is Not Only Painful, It Is Mean And Ugly.

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

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

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.

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.

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

All Of Our Life Is But A Mass Of Small Habits - Practical, Emotional, Intellectual And Spiritual - That Bear Us Irresistibly Toward Our Destiny.

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

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!

The Strenuous Life Tastes Better

The Question Of Free Will Is Insoluble On Strictly Psychological Grounds.

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.

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

The Trail Of The Human Serpent Is Thus Over Everything.

Real Culture Lives By Sympathies And Admirations, Not By Dislikes And Disdains; Under All Misleading Wrappings It Pounces Unerringly Upon The Human Core.

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.

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.

Asceticism May Be A Mere Expression Of Organic Hardihood, Disgusted With Too Much Ease.

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

We Must Not Just Patch And Tinker With Life. We Must Keep Renewing It. Embrace Novelty And Uniqueness.

Man Lives In Only One Small Room Of The Enormous House Of His Consciousness.

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.

Evil Is A Disease; And Worry Over Disease Is Itself An Additional Form Of Disease, Which Only Adds To The Original Complaint.

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

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

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.

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.

Why May We Not Be In The Universe, As Our Dogs And Cats Are In Our Drawingrooms And Libraries?

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.

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.

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

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity.

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

Be Patient And Sympathetic With The Type Of Mind That Cuts A Poor Figure In Examinations. It May, In The Long Examination Which Life Sets Us, Come Out In The End In Better Shape Than The Glib And Ready Reproducer, Its Passions Being Deeper, Its Purposes More Worthy, Its Combining Power Less Commonplace, And Its Total Mental Output Consequently More Important.

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

There Is But One Unconditional Commandment ... To Bring About The Very Largest Total Universe Of Good Which We Can See.

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.

To Know An Object Is To Lead To It Through A Context Which The World Provides

Need And Struggle Are What Excite And Inspire Us; Our Hour Of Triumph Is What Brings The Void. Not The Jews Of The Captivity, But Those Of The Days Of Solomon 's Glory Are Those From Whom The Pessimistic Utterances In Our Bible Come.

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

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

Spiritual Energy Flows In And Produces Effects, Psychological Or Material, Within The Phenomenal World.

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. So To Feel Brave, Act As If We Were Brave, Use All Our Will To That End, And A Courage-fit Will Very Likely Replace The Fit Of Fear.

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.

The Exercise Of Prayer, In Those Who Habitually Exert It, Must Be Regarded By Us Doctors As The Most Adequate And Normal Of All The Pacifiers Of The Mind And Calmers Of The Nerves.

The Deepest Longing In The Human Breast Is The Desire For Appreciation.

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.

...these Healers...my Intellect Has Been Unable To Assimilate Their Theories....but Their Facts Are Patent And Startling; And Anything That Interferes With The Multiplication Of Such Facts, And With Our Freest Opportunity Of Observing And Studying Them, Will, I Believe, Be A Public Calamity.

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

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea, Or Like Trees In The Forest. The Maple And The Pine May Whisper To Each Other With Their Leaves ... But The Trees Also Commingle Their Roots In The Darkness Underground, And The Islands Also Hang Together Through The Ocean's Bottom.

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.

We [may] Answer The Question: "why Is Snow White?" By Saying, "for The Same Reason That Soap-suds Or Whipped Eggs Are White"-in Other Words, Instead Of Giving The Reason For A Fact, We Give Another Example Of The Same Fact. This Offering A Similar Instance, Instead Of A Reason, Has Often Been Criticised As One Of The Forms Of Logical Depravity In Men. But Manifestly It Is Not A Perverse Act Of Thought, But Only An Incomplete One. Furnishing Parallel Cases Is The Necessary First Step Towards Abstracting The Reason Imbedded In Them All.

Essential Truth, The Truth Of The Intellectualists, The Truth With No One Thinking It, Is Like The Coat That Fits Tho No One Has Ever Tried It On, Like The Music That No Ear Has Listened To. It Is Less Real, Not More Real, Than The Verified Article; And To Attribute A Superior Degree Of Glory To It Seems Little More Than A Piece Of Perverse Abstraction-worship.

Since Belief Is Measured By Action, He Who Forbids Us To Believe Religion To Be True, Necessarily Also Forbids Us To Act As We Should If We Did Believe It To Be True.

Take The Happiest Man, The One Most Envied By The World, And In Nine Cases Out Of Ten His Inmost Consciousness Is One Of Failure. Either His Ideals In The Line Of His Achievements Are Pitched Far Higher Than The Achievements Themselves, Or Else He Has Secret Ideals Of Which The World Knows Nothing, And In Regard To Which He Inwardly Knows Himself To Be Found Wanting.

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.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness, And Their Companionship In The Saintly Life Need In No Way Occasion Surprise.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Great Idea Goes Through Three Stages On Its Way To Acceptance: 1) It Is Dismissed As Nonsense, 2) It Is Acknowledged As True, But Insignificant, 3) Finally, It Is Seen To Be Important, But Not Really Anything New.

The Attitude Of Unhappiness Is Not Only Painful, It Is Mean And Ugly. What Can Be More Base And Unworthy Than The Pining, Puling, Mumping Mood, No Matter By What Outward Ills It May Have Been Engendered? What Is More Injurious To Others? What Less Helpful As A Way Out Of The Difficulty? It But Fastens And Perpetuates The Trouble Which Occasioned It, And Increases The Total Evil Of The Situation. At All Costs, Then, We Ought To Reduce The Sway Of That Mood; We Ought To Scout It In Ourselves And Others, And Never Show It Tolerance.

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.

As The Brain-changes Are Continuous, So Do All These Consciousnesses Melt Into Each Other Like Dissolving Views. Properly They Are But One Protracted Consciousness, One Unbroken Stream.

So To Feel Brave, Act As If We Were Brave, Use All Our Will To That End...and A Courage-fit Will Very Likely Replace The Fit Of Fear.

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

No Matter How Full A Reservoir Of Maxims One May Possess, And No Matter How Good One's Sentiments May Be, If One Has Not Taken Advantage Of Every Concrete Opportunity To Act, One's Character May Remain Entirely Unaffected For The Better.

We Never Fully Grasp The Import Of Any True Statement Until We Have A Clear Notion Of What The Opposite Untrue Statement Would Be.

So With The Man Who Has Daily Inured Himself To Habits Of Concentrated Attention, Energetic Volition, And Self-denial In Unnecessary Things. He Will Stand Like A Tower When Everything Rocks Around Him, And When His Softer Fellow-mortals Are Winnowed Like Chaff In The Blast.

We Are Thinking Beings, And We Cannot Exclude The Intellect From Participating In Any Of Our Functions.

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.

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.

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

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

It Is So Human A Book That I Don't See How Belief In Its Divine Authority Can Survive The Reading Of It.

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

Rewards And Recognition

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

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

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

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

Footnotes -- Little Dogs Yapping At The Heels Of The Text

The Baby, Assailed By Eyes, Ears, Nose, Skin, And Entrails At Once, Feels It All As One Great Blooming, Buzzing Confusion.

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.

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

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

Inspirational Sports

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.

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

Anything You May Hold Firmly In Your Imagination Can Be Yours.

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.

It Would Probably Astound Each Of Them Beyond Measure To Be Let Into His Neighbor's Mind And To Find How Different The Scenery There Was From That In His Own.

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!

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

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.

As We Take, In Fact, A General View Of The Wonderful Stream Of Our Consciousness, What Strikes Us First Is This Different Pace Of Its Parts. Like A Bird 's Life, It Seems To Be Made Of An Alternation Of Flights And Perchings.

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

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

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.

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

It Makes A Tremendous Emotional And Practical Difference To One Whether One Accepts The Universe In The Drab Discolored Way Of Stoic Resignation To Necessity, Or With The Passionate Happiness Of Christian Saints.

Metaphysics Means Nothing But An Unusually Obstinate Effort To Think Clearly.

Selection Is The Very Keel On Which Our Mental Ship Is Built. And In This Case Of Memory Its Utility Is Obvious. If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing.

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

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

Instinct Leads, Logic Does But Follow.

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.

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.

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.

In All Primary School Work The Principle Of Multiple Impressions Is Well Recognized.

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

It Is As If There Were In The Human Consciousness A Sense Of Reality, A Feeling Of Objective Presence, A Perception Of What We May Call Something There, More Deep And More General Than Any Of The Special And Particular Senses By Which The Current Psychology Supposes Existent Realities To Be Originally Revealed.

Religion Is A Monumental Chapter In The History Of Human Egotism.

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, Never To Be Undone.

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

Faith Is One Of The Forces By Which Men Live, And The Total Absence Of It Means Collapse

I Am, Myself, A Very Poor Visualizer And Find That I Can Seldom Call To Mind Even A Single Letter Of The Alphabet In Purely Retinal Terms. I Must Trace The Letter By Running My Mental Eye Over Its Contour In Order That The Image Of It Shall Leave Any Distinctness At All.

We And God Have Business With Each Other, And In Opening Ourselves To God's Influence Our Deepest Destiny Is Fulfilled.

In The Dim Background Of Our Mind We Know Meanwhile What We Ought To Be Doing: Getting Up, Dressing Ourselves, Answering The Person Who Has Spoken To Us, Trying To Make The Next Step In Our Reasoning. But Somehow We Cannot Start.

Those Thoughts Are Truth Which Guide Us To Beneficial Interaction With Sensible Particulars As They Occur, Whether They Copy These In Advance Or Not.

Our View Of The World Is Truly Shaped By What We Decide To Hear.

What We Really Need The Poet's And Orator's I Help To Keep Alive In Us Is Not, Then, The Common And Gregarious Courage Which Robert Shaw Showed When He Marched With You, Men Of The Seventh Regiment. It Is That More Lonely Courage Which He Showed When He Dropped His Warm Commission In The Glorious Second To Head Your Dubious Fortunes, Negroes Of The Fifty-fourth. That Lonely Kind Of Courage (civic Courage As We Call It In Times Of Peace) Is The Kind Of Valor To Which The Monuments Of Nations Should Most Of All Be Reared.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ingenuity In Meeting And Pursuing The Pupil, That Tact For The Concrete Situation, Though They Are The Alpha And Omega Of The Teacher's Art, Are Things To Which Psychology Cannot Help Us In The Least.

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.

Wisdom Is Learning What To Overlook.

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

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.

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

Man Alone Of All The Creatures Of Earth Can Change His Own Pattern. Man Alone Is The Architect Of His Own Destiny.

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.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

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

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.

The Function Of Ignoring, Of Inattention, Is As Vital A Factor In Mental Progress As The Function Of Attention Itself.

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.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

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

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

[there Are, In Us] Possibilities That Take Our Breath Away, And Show A World Wider Than Either Physics Or Philistine Ethics Can Imagine. Here Is A World In Which All Is Well, In Spite Of Certain Forms Of Death, Death Of Hope, Death Of Strength, Death Of Responsibility, Of Fear And Wrong, Death Of Everything That Paganism, Naturalism And Legalism Pin Their Trust On.

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

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness.

We Are Proud Of A Human Nature That Could Be So Passionately Extreme, But We Shrink From Advising Others To Follow The Example.

Most People, Probably, Are In Doubt About Certain Matters Ascribed To Their Past. They May Have Seen Them, May Have Said Them, Done Them, Or They May Only Have Dreamed Or Imagined They Did So.

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Grace Metalious

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