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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.

-William James

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Let Sanguine Healthy-mindedness Do

William James

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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.

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Faith Branches Off The Highroad Before Reason Begins

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

We May Be In The Universe As Dogs And Cats Are In Our Libraries, Seeing The Books And Hearing The Conversation, But Having No Inkling Of The Meaning Of It All.

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

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

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.

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

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

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

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

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.

The Art Of Remembering Is The Art Of Thinking. When We Wish To Fix A New Thing In Either Our Own Mind Or A Pupil's, Our Conscious Effort Should Not Be So Much To Impress And Retain It As To Connect It With Something Else Already There. The Connecting Is The Thinking; And, If We Attend Clearly To The Connection, The Connected Thing Will Certainly Be Likely To Remain Within Recall.

In My Individual Heart I Fully Believe My Faith Is As Robust As Yours. The Trouble With Your Robust And Full Bodied Faiths, However, Is, That They Begin To Cut Each Others Throats Too Soon, And For Getting On In The World And Establishing A Modus Vivendi These Pestilential Refinements And Reasonablenesses And Moderations Have To Creep In.

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.

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

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

Most Men's Friendships Are Too Inarticulate.

Truth Happens To An Idea

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

There Can Be No Existence Of Evil As A Force To The Healthy-minded Individual.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can. . . . The More Of The Details Of Our Daily Life We Can Hand Over To The Effortless Custody Of Automatism, The More Our Higher Powers Of Mind Will Be Set Free For Their Own Proper Work.

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

There Are No Differences But Differences Of Degree Between Different Degrees Of Difference And No Difference.

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.

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

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, And That Those Other Worlds Must Contain Experiences Which Have A Meaning For Our Life Also; And That Although In The Main Their Experiences And Those Of This World Keep Discrete, Yet The Two Become Continuous At Certain Points, And Higher Energies Filter In.

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

Beyond The Very Extreme Of Fatigue And Distress, We May Find Amounts Of Ease And Power We Never Dreamed Ourselves To Own; Sources Of Strength Never Taxed At All Because We Never Push Through The Obstruction

You Can Be An Artist Without Visual Images, A Reader Without Eyes, A Mass Of Erudition With A Bad Elementary Memory. In Almost Any Subject Your Passion For The Subject Will Save You. If You Only Care Enough For A Result, You Will Almost Certainly Attain It. If You Wish To Be Rich, You Will Be Rich; If You Wish To Be Learned, You Will Be Learned; If You Wish To Be Good, You Will Be Good. Only You Must, Then, Really Wish These Things, And Wish Them With Exclusiveness, And Not Wish At The Same Time A Hundred Other Incompatible Things Just As Strongly.

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?

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

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.

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being.

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

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.

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 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.

Compared To What We Ought To Be, We Are Half Awake.

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, 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.

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

Good-humor Is A Philosophic State Of Mind; It Seems To Say To Nature That We Take Her No More Seriously Than She Takes Us. I Maintain That One Should Always Talk Of Philosophy With A Smile.

Man, Biologically Considered ... Is Simply The Most Formidable Of All Beasts Of Prey, And, Indeed, The Only One That Preys Systematically On Its Own Kind.

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.

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.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

Lets Take Full Advantage Of This Discovery

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

Mystical Experiences

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

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

The Difference Between Objective And Subjective Extension Is One Of Relation To A Context Solely.

Our Faith Is Faith In Someone Else's Faith, And In The Greatest Matters This Is Most The Case.

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

The Gist Of The Matter Is This: Every Impression That Comes In From Without, Be It A Sentence Which We Hear, An Object Of Vision, Or An Effluvium Which Assails Our Nose, No Sooner Enters Our Consciousness Than It Is Drafted Off In Some Determinate Direction Or Other, Making Connection With The Other Materials Already There, And Finally Producing What We Call Our Reaction. The Particular Connections It Strikes Into Are Determined By Our Past Experiences And The 'associations' Of The Present Sort Of Impression With Them.

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.

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

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

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

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.

Don't Preach Too Much To Your Pupils Or Abound In Good Talk In The Abstract. Lie In Wait Rather For The Practical Opportunities, Be Prompt To Seize Those As They Pass, And Thus At One Operation Get Your Pupils Both To Think, To Feel, And To Do.

In The Last Analysis, Then, We Believe That We All Know And Think About And Talk About The Same World Because We Believe Our Percepts Are Possessed By Us In Common

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Greatest Discovery Of My Generation Is That A Human Being Can Alter His Life By Altering His Attitudes.

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 First Thing The Intellect Does With An Object Is To Class It Along With Something Else. But Any Object That Is Infinitely Important To Us And Awakens Our Devotion Feels To Us Also As If It Must Be Sui Generis And Unique. Probably A Crab Would Be Filled With A Sense Of Personal Outrage If It Could Hear Us Class It Without Ado Or Apology As A Crustacean, And Thus Dispose Of It. 'i Am No Such Thing,' It Would Say; 'i Am Myself, Myself Alone.

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

The Greatest Discovery Of The 19th Century Was Not In The Realm Of The Physical Sciences, But The Power Of The Subconscious Mind Touched By Faith. Any Individual Can Tap Into An Eternal Reservoir Of Power That Will Enable Them To Overcome Any Problem That May Arise. All Weaknesses Can Be Overcome, Bodily Healing, Financial Independence, Spiritual Awakening, And Prosperity Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. This Is The Superstructure Of Happiness.

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

The "through-and-through" Universe Seems To Suffocate Me With Its Infallible Impeccable All-pervasiveness. Its Necessity , With No Possibilities; Its Relations, With No Subjects, Make Me Feel As If I Had Entered Into A Contract With No Reserved Rights ... It Seems Too Buttoned-up And White-chokered And Clean-shaven A Thing To Speak For The Vast Slow-breathing Unconscious Kosmos With Its Dread Abysses And Its Unknown Tides.

The Trail Of The Human Serpent Is Thus Over Everything.

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.

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.

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

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

Seek Out That Particular Mental Attribute Which Makes You Feel Most Deeply And Vitally Alive, Along With Which Comes The Inner Voice Which Says, 'this Is The Real Me,' And When You Have Found That Attitude, Follow It.

Wisdom Is Learning What To Overlook.

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

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

As Charles Lamb Says, There Is Nothing So Nice As Doing Good By Stealth And Being Found Out By Accident, So I Now Say It Is Even Nicer To Make Heroic Decisions And To Be Prevented By 'circumstances Beyond Your Control' From Ever Trying To Execute Them.

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

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.

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

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.

An Enormous Mass Of Experience, Both Of Homeopathic Doctors And Their Patients, Is Invoked In Favor Of The Efficacy Of These Remedies And Doses.

Habit Is A Second Nature, Or Rather, It Is 'ten Times Nature'.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

We Ought, All Of Us, To Realize Each Other In This Intense, Pathetic, And Important Way. If You Say That This Is Absurd, And That We Cannot Be In Love With Everyone At Once, I Merely Point Out To You That, As A Matter Of Fact, Certain Persons Do Exist With An Enormous Capacity For Friendship And For Taking Delight In Other People's Lives; And That Such Persons Know More Of Truth Than If Their Hearts Were Not So Big.

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

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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

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

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.

The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race.

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

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.

The First Thing To Learn In Intercourse With Others Is Non-interference With Their Own Particular Ways Of Being Happy, Provided Those Ways Do Not Assume To Interfere By Violence With Ours.

Neither Moral Relations Nor The Moral Law Can Swing In Vacuo. Their Only Habitat Can Be A Mind Which Feels Them; And No World Composed Of Merely Physical Facts Can Possibly Be A World To Which Ethical Propositions Apply.

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The Emotions Aren't Always Immediately Subject To Reason, But They Are Always Immediately Subject To Action.

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.

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

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.

Materialism Means Simply The Denial That The Moral Order Is Eternal, And The Cutting Off Of Ultimate Hopes; Spiritualism Means Theaffirmation Of An Eternal Moral Order And The Letting Loose Of Hope.

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

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

Conversion Is In Its Essence A Normal Adolescent Phenomenon, Incidental To The Passage From The Child's Small Universe To The Wider Intellectual And Spiritual Life Of Maturity.

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

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

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.

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

Rewards And Recognition

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

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

If You Want A Confidence, Act As If You Already Have It. Try The "as If" Technique.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

A Great Many People Think They Are Thinking When They Are Merely Rearranging Their Prejudices.

Believe That Life Is Worth Living And Your Belief Will Help Create The Fact.

Great Emergencies And Crises Show Us How Much Greater Our Vital Resources Are Than We Had Supposed.

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

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.

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

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

Making A Difference

No Decision Is, In Itself, A Decision.

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

Where Quality Is The Thing Sought After, The Thing Of Supreme Quality Is Cheap, Whatever The Price One Has To Pay For It.

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.

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

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!

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

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

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.

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.

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'

Science Must Constantly Be Reminded That Her Purposes Are Not The Only Purposes And That The Order Of Uniform Causation Which She Has Use For, And Is Therefore Right In Postulating, May Be Enveloped In A Wider Order, On Which She Has No Claim At All.

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

Making A Difference

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.

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

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

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

The First Effect Of The Mind Growing Cultivated Is That Processes Once Multiple Get To Be Performed In A Single Act. Lazarus Has Called This The Progressive "condensation" Of Thought. ... Steps Really Sink From Sight. An Advanced Thinker Sees The Relations Of His Topics Is Such Masses And So Instantaneously That When He Comes To Explain To Younger Minds It Is Often Hard ... Bowditch, Who Translated And Annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, Said That Whenever His Author Prefaced A Proposition By The Words "it Is Evident," He Knew That Many Hours Of Hard Study Lay Before Him.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

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.

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

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

The 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.

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.

The Subjectivist In Morals, When His Moral Feelings Are At War With The Facts About Him, Is Always Free To Seek Harmony By Toningdown The Sensitiveness Of The Feelings.

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.

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.

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