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It Does Not Follow, Because Our Ancestors Made So Many Errors Of Fact And Mixed Them With Their Religion, That We Should Therefore Leave Off Being Religious At All. By Being Religious We Establish Ourselves In Possession Of Ultimate Reality At The Only Points At Which Reality Is Given Us To Guard. Our Responsible Concern Is With Our Private Destiny, After All.

-William James

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It Does Not Follow,

William James

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It Does Not Follow, Because Our Ancestors Made So Many Errors Of Fact And Mixed Them With Their Religion, That We Should Therefore Leave Off Being Religious At All. By Being Religious We Establish Ourselves In Possession Of Ultimate Reality At The Only Points At Which Reality Is Given Us To Guard. Our Responsible Concern Is With Our Private Destiny, After All.

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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.

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.

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

To Give Up Pretensions Is As Blessed A Relief As To Get Them Ratified.

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

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

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

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

Hogamus, Higamous Man Is Polygamous Higamus, Hogamous Woman Monogamous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Smitten As We Are With The Vision Of Social Righteousness, A God Indifferent To Everything But Adulation, And Full Of Partiality For His Individual Favorites, Lacks An Essential Element Of Largeness.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Culture Religion

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 Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

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.

As There Is No Worse Lie Than A Truth Misunderstood By Those Who Hear It, So Reasonable Arguments, Challenges To Magnanimity, And Appeals To Sympathy Or Justice, Are Folly When We Are Dealing With Human Crocodiles And Boa-constrictors.

Every Sort Of Energy And Endurance, Of Courage And Capacity For Handling Life's Evils, Is Set Free In Those Who Have Religious Faith.

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

Effort And Hard Work

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

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!

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.

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

Changing Your Life

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

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

Once A Decision Is Reached, Stop Worrying And Start Working.

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

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.

Of All The Beautiful Truths Pertaining To The Soul None Is More Gladdening Or Fruitful Than To Know You Can Regenerate And Make Yourself What You Will.

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

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

Focus On Increasing Service. Becoming Great Where You Are. Pile In The Wood. The Heat Will Follow.

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

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

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

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.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

The Discovery Of The Power Of Our Thoughts Will Prove To Be The Most Important Discovery Of Our Time

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.

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.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

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

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.

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

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

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'

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

Science Herself Consults Her Heart When She Lays It Down That The Infinite Ascertainment Of Fact And Correction Of False Belief Are The Supreme Goods For Man.

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

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

Man's Chief Difference From The Brutes Lies In The Exuberant Excess Of His Subjective Propensities His Preeminence Over Them Simply And Solely In The Number And In The Fantastic And Unnecessary Character Of His Wants, Physical, Moral, Aesthetic, And Intellectual. Had His Whole Life Not Been A Quest For The Superfluous, He Would Never Have Established Himself As Inexpugnably As He Has Done In The Necessary.

Results Should Not Be Too Voluntarily Aimed At Or Too Busily Thought Of. They Are Sure To Float Up Of Their Own Accord From A Long Enough Daily Work At A Given Matter.

Lets Take Full Advantage Of This Discovery

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

If An Unusual Necessity Forces Us Onward, A Surprising Thing Occurs. The Fatigue Gets Worse Up To A Certain Point, When, Gradually Or Suddenly, It Passes Away And We Are Fresher Than Before!

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.

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

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

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

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

Every Claim Creates An Obligation.

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.

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.

Both Thought And Feeling Are Determinants Of Conduct, And The Same Conduct May Be Determined Either By Feeling Or By Thought.

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.

A Difference Which Makes No Difference Is No Difference At All.

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'.

Intelligence Is A Fixed Goal With Variable Means Of Achieving It.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Who Does Not See That We Are Likely To Ascertain The Distinctive Significance Of Religious Melancholy And Happiness, Or Of Religious Trances, Far Better By Comparing Them As Conscientiously As We Can With Other Varieties Of Melancholy, Happiness, And Trance, Than By Refusing To Consider Their Place In Any More General Series, And Treating Them As If They Were Outside Of Nature's Order Altogether?

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.

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.

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

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.

Democracy Is Still Upon Its Trial. The Civic Genius Of Our People Is Its Only Bulwark.

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

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

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.

Just For Today I Will Exercise My Soul In Three Ways: I Will Do Somebody A Good Turn And Not Get Found Out. I Will Do At Least Two Things I Don't Want To Do

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Regarding Mutual Tolerance: It Is Negative In One Sense, But Positive In Another. It Absolutely Forbids Us To Be Forward In Pronouncing On The Meaninglessness Of Forms Of Existence Other Than Our Own; And It Commands Us To Tolerate, Respect, And Indulge Those Whom We See Harmlessly Interested And Happy In Their Own Ways, However Unintelligible These May Be To Us. Hands Off.

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.

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

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

Whenever You're In Conflict With Someone, There Is One Factor That Can Make The Difference Between Damaging Your Relationship And Deepening It. That Factor Is Attitude.

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.

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

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

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.

All The Qualities Of A Man Acquire Dignity When He Knows That The Service Of The Collectivity That Owns Him Needs Them. If Proud Of The Collectivity, His Own Pride Rises In Proportion. No Collectivity Is Like An Army For Nourishing Such Pride.

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!.

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

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

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

The More Rational Statement Is That We Feel Sorry Because We Strike, Afraid Because We Tremble, And Not That We Cry, Strike, Or Tremble Because We Are Sorry, Angry, Or Fearful As The Case May Be.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

No More Fiendish Punishment Could Be Devised, Were Such A Thing Physically Possible, Than That One Should Be Turned Loose In Society And Remain Absolutely Unnoticed.

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.

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

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

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

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

[t]here Is Very Little Difference Between One Person And Another, But What Little Difference Ther Eis, Is Very Important.

Give Up The Feeling Of Responsibility, Let Go Your Hold, Resign The Care Of Your Destiny To Higher Powers, Be Genuinely Indifferent As To What Becomes Of It All And You Will Find Not Only That You Gain A Perfect Inward Relief, But Often Also, In Addition, The Particular Goods You Sincerely Thought You Were Renouncing.

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.

Men Are Now Proud Of Belonging To A Conquering Nation, And Without A Murmur They Lay Down Their Persons And Their Wealth, If By So Doing They May Fend Off Subjection.

Our Volitional Habits Depend, Then, First, On What The Stock Of Ideas Is Which We Have; And, Second, On The Habitual Coupling Of The Several Ideas With Action Or Inaction Respectively.

Man Can Alter His Life By Altering His Thinking.

The War For Our Union, With All The Constitutional Issues Which It Settled, And All The Military Lessons Which It Gathered In, Has Throughout Its Dilatory Length But One Meaning In The Eyes Of History. It Freed The Country From The Social Plague Which Until Then Had Made Political Development Impossible In The United States. More And More, As The Years Pass, Does The Meaning Stand Forth As The Sole Meaning.

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

An Idea, To Be Suggestive, Must Come To The Individual With The Force Of Revelation.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The Lunatic's Visions Of Horror Are All Drawn From The Material Of Daily Fact.

If You Believe That Feeling Bad Or Worrying Long Enough Will Change A Past Or Future Event, Then You Are Residing On Another Planet With A Different Reality System.

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

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

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

The 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Transition From Tenseness, Self-responsibility, And Worry, To Equanimity, Receptivity, And Peace, Is The Most Wonderful Of All Those Shiftings Of Inner Equilibrium, Those Changes Of Personal Centre Of Energy, Which I Have Analyzed So Often; And The Chief Wonder Of It Is That It So Often Comes About, Not By Doing, But By Simply Relaxing And Throwing The Burden Down.

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

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

The Greatest Revolution Of Our Generation Is The Discovery That Human Beings, By Changing The Inner Attitudes Of Their Minds, Can Change The Outer Aspects Of Their Lives.

Organization And Method Mean Much, But Contagious Human Characters Mean More In A University.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Religious Awe Is The Same Organic Thrill Which We Feel In A Forest At Twilight, Or In A Mountain Gorge.

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William Glasser

Wernher Von Braun

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