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If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing. It Would Take Us As Long To Recall A Space Of Time As It Took The Original Time To Elapse, And We Should Never Get Ahead With Our Thinking. All Recollected Times Undergo, Accordingly, What M. Ribot Calls Foreshortening; And This Foreshortening Is Due To The Omission Of An Enormous Number Of Facts Which Filled Them.

-William James

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If We Remembered Everything,

William James

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If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing. It Would Take Us As Long To Recall A Space Of Time As It Took The Original Time To Elapse, And We Should Never Get Ahead With Our Thinking. All Recollected Times Undergo, Accordingly, What M. Ribot Calls Foreshortening; And This Foreshortening Is Due To The Omission Of An Enormous Number Of Facts Which Filled Them.

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Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

Mental Fire Is What Won't Burn Real Sticks; Mental Water Is What Won't Necessarily (though Of Course It May) Put Out Even A Mentalfire.

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

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

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Your Life

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.

The Most Peculiar Social Self Which One Is Apt To Have Is In The Mind Of The Person One Is In Love With.

We Are Not Only Gregarious Animals, Liking To Be In Sight Of Our Fellows, But We Have An Innate Propensity To Get Ourselves Noticed, And Noticed Favorably, By Our Kind.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

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

When Once A Decision Is Reached And Execution Is The Order Of The Day, Dismiss Absolutely All Responsibility And Care About The Outcome.

Truths Emerge From Facts, But They Dip Forward Into Facts Again And Add To Them; Which Facts Again Create Or Reveal New Truth (the Word Is Indifferent) And So On Indefinitely. The 'facts' Themselves Meanwhile Are Not True. They Simply Are. Truth Is The Function Of The Beliefs That Start And Terminate Among Them.

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.

[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.

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.

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 Greatest Discovery Of The 20th Century Is That Our Attitude Of Mind Determines Our Quality Of Life, Not Circumstances.

A New Position Of Responsibility Will Usually Show A Man To Be A Far Stronger Creature Than Was Supposed.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

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.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

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

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

To Consider Hypotheses Is Surely Always Better Than To Dogmatize Ins Blaue Hinein

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.

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.

First... A New Theory Is Attacked As Absurd; Then It Is Admitted To Be True, But Obvious And Insignificant; Finally It Is Seen To Be So Important That Its Adversaries Claim That They Themselves Discovered It.

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

Our Normal Waking Consciousness, Rational Consciousness As We Call It, Is But One Special Type Of Consciousness, Whilst All About It, Parted From It By The Filmiest Of Screens, There Lie Potential Forms Of Consciousness Entirely Different.

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.

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort. We Postpone And Postpone Until Those Smiling Possibilities Are Dead... By Neglecting The Necessary Concrete Labor, By Sparing Ourselves The Little Daily Tax, We Are Positively Digging The Graves Of Our Higher Possibilities.

The Only Function That One Experience Can Perform Is To Lead Into Another Experience; And The Only Fulfillment We Can Speak Of Isthe Reaching Of A Certain Experienced End. When One Experience Leads To (or Can Lead To) The Same End As Another, They Agree In Function.

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

Rewards And Recognition

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

To Be Conscious Means Not Simply To Be, But To Be Reported, Known, To Have Awareness Of One's Being Added To That Being.

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

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

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!.

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 University Most Worthy Of Rational Admiration Is That One In Which Your Lonely Thinker Can Feel Himself Lonely, Most Positively Furthered, And Most Richly Fed

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

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.

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

But It Is The Bane Of Psychology To Suppose That Where Results Are Similar, Processes Must Be The Same. Psychologists Are Too Apt To Reason As Geometers Would, If The Latter Were To Say That The Diameter Of A Circle Is The Same Thing As Its Semi-circumference, Because, Forsooth, They Terminate In The Same Two Points.

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

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

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

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.

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

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

Effort And Hard Work

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.

Procrastination Is Attitude's Natural Assassin. There's Nothing So Fatiguing As An Uncompleted Task

Procrastination

Our Colleges Ought To Have Lit Up In Us A Lasting Relish For A Better Kind Of Man, A Loss Of Appetite For Mediocrities.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

To Know One Thing Thoroughly Would Be To Know The Universe.

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.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All. And Often Enough Our Faith Beforehand In An Uncertified Result Is The Only Thing That Makes The Result Come True.

So It Is With Children Who Learn To Read Fluently And Well: They Begin To Take Flight Into Whole New Worlds As Effortlessly As Young Birds Take To The Sky.

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.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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.

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

Human Beings Are Born Into This Little Span Of Life Of Which The Best Thing Is Its Friendships And Intimacies … And Yet They Leave Their Friendships And Intimacies With No Cultivation, To Grow As They Will By The Roadside, Expecting Them To "keep" By Force Of Mere Inertia.

If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing. It Would Take Us As Long To Recall A Space Of Time As It Took The Original Time To Elapse, And We Should Never Get Ahead With Our Thinking. All Recollected Times Undergo, Accordingly, What M. Ribot Calls Foreshortening; And This Foreshortening Is Due To The Omission Of An Enormous Number Of Facts Which Filled Them.

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

The God Of Many Men Is Little More Than Their Court Of Appeal Against The Damnatory Judgment Passed On Their Failures By The Opinion Of The World.

Our Ideas Must Agree With Realities, Be Such Realities Concrete Or Abstract

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

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

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.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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

I Believe There Is No Source Of Deception In The Investigation Of Nature Which Can Compare With A Fixed Belief That Certain Kinds Of Phenomena Are Impossible.

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.

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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.

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.

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

Religion Must Be Considered Vindicated In A Certain Way From The Attacks Of Her Critics.

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

Time Itself Comes In Drops.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

Our Esteem For Facts Has Not Neutralized In Us All Religiousness. It Is Itself Almost Religious. Our Scientific Temper Is Devout.

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

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

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

The Mind, In Short, Works On The Data It Receives Very Much As The Sculptor Works On His Block Of Stone.

The Difference Between An Interesting And A Tedious Teacher Consists In Little More Than The Inventiveness By Which The One Is Able To Mediate These Associations And Connections, And In The Dullness In Discovering Such Transitions Which The Other Shows.

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

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

Once You Accept An Idea, It's An Idea Whose Time Has Come.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Hardly Ever Can A Youth Transferred To The Society Of His Betters Unlearn The Nasality And Other Vices Of Speech Bred In Him By The Associations Of His Growing Years. Hardly Ever, Indeed, No Matter How Much Money There Be In His Pocket, Can He Ever Learn To Dress Like A Gentleman-born. The Merchants Offer Their Wares As Eagerly To Him As To The Veriest Swell, But He Simply Cannot Buy The Right Things.

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.

We Do Not Sing Because We Are Happy, We Are Happy Because We Sing.

The History Of Philosophy Is To A Great Extent That Of A Certain Clash Of Human Temperaments.

Fatalism, Whose Solving Word In All Crises Of Behavior Is All Striving Is Vain, Will Never Reign Supreme, For The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race. Moral Creeds Which Speak To That Impulse Will Be Widely Successful In Spite Of Inconsistency, Vagueness, And Shadowy Determination Of Expectancy. Man Needs A Rule For His Will, And Will Invent One If One Be Not Given Him.

But Facts Are Facts, And If We Only Get Enough Of Them Theyare Sure To Combine.

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 Mind Is Made Up By What It Feeds Upon.

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.

The War Against War Is Going To Be No Holiday Excursion Or Camping Party.

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works So As Positively To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge.

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

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.

The Great Thing, Then, In All Education, Is To Make Our Nervous System Our Ally Instead Of Our Enemy.

In Any Project The Important Factor Is Your Belief. Without Belief, There Can Be No Successful Outcome.

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 Excites And Interests The Looker-on At Life, What The Romances And The Statues Celebrate, And The Grim Civic Monuments Remind Us Of, Is The Everlasting Battle Of The Powers Of Light With Those Of Darkness; With Heroism Reduced To Its Bare Chance, Yet Ever And Anon Snatching Victory From The Jaws Of Death.

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.

Pragmatism Asks Its Usual Question. "grant An Idea Or Belief To Be True," It Says, "what Concrete Difference Will Its Being True Make In Anyone's Actual Life? How Will The Truth Be Realized? What Experiences Will Be Different From Those Which Would Obtain If The Belief Were False? What, In Short, Is The Truth's Cash-value In Experiential Terms?

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

Genius Is The Capacity For Seeing Relationships Where Lesser Men See None.

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

The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Good Teacher Is To Get A Bad Conscience About Her Profession Because She Feels Herself Hopeless As A Psychologist.

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.

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.

Sobriety Diminishes, Discriminates, And Says No; Drunkenness Expands, Unites, And Says Yes. Not Through Mere Perversity Do Men Run After It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Leap Across An Abyss, One Is Better Served By Faith Than Doubt.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists. The Two Associated Objects Grow, As It Were, Together; The Interesting Portion Sheds Its Quality Over The Whole; And Thus Things Not Interesting In Their Own Right Borrow An Interest Which Becomes As Real And As Strong As That Of Any Natively Interesting Thing.

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

The Most Violent Revolutions In An Individuals Beliefs Leave Most Of His Old Order Standing. Time And Space, Cause And Effect, Nature And History, And Ones Own Biography Remain Untouched. New Truth Is Always A Go-between, A Smoother-over Of Transitions. It Marries Old Opinion To New Fact So As Ever To Show A Minimum Of Jolt, A Maximum Of Continuity.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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

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

A Man Has As Many Social Selves As There Are Individuals Who Recognize Him.

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

The First Lecture In Psychology That I Ever Heard Was The First I Ever Gave.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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