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Most Of Us Can Learn To Live In Perfect Comfort On Higher Levels Of Power. Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitements Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. It Is Evident That Our Organism Has Stored-up Reserves Of Energy That Are Ordinarily Not Called Upon - Deeper And Deeper Strata Of Explosible Material, Ready For Use By Anyone Who Probes So Deep. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

-William James

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Most Of Us Can

William James

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Most Of Us Can Learn To Live In Perfect Comfort On Higher Levels Of Power. Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitements Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. It Is Evident That Our Organism Has Stored-up Reserves Of Energy That Are Ordinarily Not Called Upon - Deeper And Deeper Strata Of Explosible Material, Ready For Use By Anyone Who Probes So Deep. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

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The Prescription Is That The Subject Must Be Made To Show New Aspects Of Itself; To Prompt New Questions; In A Word, To Change. From An Unchanging Subject The Attention Inevitably Wanders Away.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

Ideas Are So Much Flat Psychological Surface Unless Some Mirrored Matter Gives Them Cognitive Lustre. This Is Why As A Pragmatisti Have So Carefully Posited 'reality' Ab Initio, And Why Throughout My Whole Discussion, I Remain An Epistemologist Realist.

In The Matter Of Belief, We Are All Extreme Conservatives.

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.

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.

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

The Union Of The Mathematician With The Poet, Fervor With Measure, Passion With Correctness, This Surely Is The Ideal.

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

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

To Plead The Organic Causation Of A Religious State Of Mind, Then, In Refutation Of Its Claim To Possess Superior Spiritual Value, Is Quite Illogical And Arbitrary, Unless One Have Already Worked Out In Advance Some Psycho-physical Theory Connecting Spiritual Values In General With Determinate Sorts Of Physiological Change. Otherwise None Of Our Thoughts And Feelings, Not Even Our Scientific Doctrines, Not Even Our Dis -beliefs, Could Retain Any Value As Revelations Of The Truth, For Every One Of Them Without Exception Flows From The State Of Their Possessor's Body At The Time.

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.

We Have Lost The Power Even Of Imagining What The Ancient Idealization Of Poverty Could Have Meant: The Liberation From Material Attachments, The Unbribed Soul, The Manlier Indifference, The Paying Our Way By What We Are And Not By What We Have, The Right To Fling Away Our Life At Any Moment Irresponsibly - The More Athletic Trim, In Short, The Moral Fighting Shape.

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

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'.

Old-fashioned Determinism Was What We May Call Hard Determinism. It Did Not Shrink From Such Words As Fatality, Bondage Of The Will, Necessitation, And The Like. Nowadays, We Have A Soft Determinism Which Abhors Harsh Words, And, Repudiating Fatality, Necessity, And Even Predetermination, Says That Its Real Name Is Freedom; For Freedom Is Only Necessity Understood, And Bondage To The Highest Is Identical With True Freedom.

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

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

If You Wish To Upset The Law That All Crows Are Black, You Mustn't Seek To Show That No Crows Are; It Is Enough If You Prove One Single Crow To Be White.

True To Her Inveterate Habit, Rationalism Reverts To 'principles,' And Thinks That When An Abstraction Once Is Named, We Own An Oracular Solution.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Man Is Essentially The Imitative Animal. His Whole Educabilityand In Fact The Whole History Of Civilization Depend On This Trait, Which His Strong Tendencies To Rivalry, Jealousy, And Acquisitiveness Reinforce.

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

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.

Genius... Means Little More Than The Faculty Of Perceiving In An Unhabitual Way.

The Strenuous Life Tastes Better

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

To Change Ones Life: Start Immediately. Do It Flamboyantly.

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

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

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

To Spend Life For Something Which Outlasts It.

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

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

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

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

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

We, The Lineal Representatives Of The Successful Enactors Of One Scene Of Slaughter After Another, Must, Whatever More Pacific Virtues We May Also Possess, Still Carry About With Us, Ready At Any Moment To Burst Into Flame, The Smoldering And Sinister Traits Of Character By Means Of Which They Lived Through So Many Massacres, Harming Others, But Themselves Unharmed.

'pure Experience' Is The Name I Gave To The Immediate Flux Of Life Which Furnishes The Material To Our Later Reflection With Its Conceptual Categories.

Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitement's Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

The Deepest Hunger In Human Beings Is The Desire To Be Appreciated.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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, 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.

Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. Our Fires Are Damped, Our Drafts Are Checked. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Possible Mental And Physical Resources.

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

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.

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.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling; And The Recesses Of Feeling, The Darker, Blinder Strata Of Character, Are The Only Places In The World In Which We Catch Real Fact In The Making, And Directly Perceive How Events Happen, And How Work Is Actually Done.

Man, Whatever Else He May Be, Is Primarily A Practical Being, Whose Mind Is Given Him To Aid In Adapting Him To This World's Life

In Its Broadest Term, Religion Says That There Is An Unseen Order, And That Our Supreme Good Lies In Rightful Relations To It.

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.

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

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

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

There Is A Law In Psychology That If You Form A Picture In Your Mind Of What You Would Like To Be, And You Keep And Hold That Picture There Long Enough, You Will Soon Become Exactly As You Have Been Thinking.

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

Action Seems To Follow Feeling, But Really Action And Feeling Go Together; And By Regulating The Action, Which Is Under The More Direct Control Of The Will, We Can Indirectly Regulate The Feeling.

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

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Can Act As If There Were A God; Feel As If We Were Free; Consider Nature As If She Were Full Of Special Designs; Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal; And We Find Then That These Words Do Make A Genuine Difference In Our Moral Life.

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.

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.

It Is Wrong Always, Everywhere, And For Everyone, To Believe Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence.

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.

(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.

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

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.

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

Most Of Us Can Learn To Live In Perfect Comfort On Higher Levels Of Power. Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitements Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. It Is Evident That Our Organism Has Stored-up Reserves Of Energy That Are Ordinarily Not Called Upon - Deeper And Deeper Strata Of Explosible Material, Ready For Use By Anyone Who Probes So Deep. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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.

Life Is One Long Struggle Between Conclusions Based On Abstract Ways Of Conceiving Cases, And Opposite Conclusions Prompted By Our Instinctive Perception Of Them.

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

The True'to Put It Very Briefly, Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Thinking, Just As 'the Right' Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Behaving.

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

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.

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

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.

We Must Frankly Confess, Then, Using Our Empirical Common Sense And Ordinary Practical Prejudices, That In The World That Actually Is, The Virtues Of Sympathy, Charity, And Non-resistance May Be, And Often Have Been, Manifested In Excess. ... You Will Agree To This In General, For In Spite Of The Gospel, In Spite Of Quakerism, In Spite Of Tolstoi, You Believe In Fighting Fire With Fire, In Shooting Down Usurpers, Locking Up Thieves, And Freezing Out Vagabonds And Swindlers.

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

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

An Act Has No Ethical Quality Whatever Unless It Be Chosen Out Of Several All Equally Possible.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

...by Far The Most Usual Way Of Handling Phenomena So Novel That They Would Make For A Serious Rearrangement Of Our Preconceptions Is To Ignore Them Altogether, Or To Abuse Those Who Bear Witness For Them.

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.

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

A Genius Is The Man In Whom You Are Least Likely To Find The Power Of Attending To Anything Insipid Or Distasteful In Itself. He Breaks His Engagements, Leaves His Letters Unanswered, Neglects His Family Duties Incorrigibly, Because He Is Powerless To Turn His Attention Down And Back From Those More Interesting Trains Of Imagery With Which His Genius Constantly Occupies His Mind.

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

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

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

We Don't Laugh Because We're Happy - We're Happy Because We Laugh.

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

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

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

We Hear The Words We Have Spoken, Feel Our Own Blow As We Give It, Or Read In The Bystander's Eyes The Success Or Failure Of Our Conduct.

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.

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

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.

Nothing Is So Fatiguing As The Eternal Hanging On Of An Uncompleted Task.

Procrastination

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

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

The Man Whose Acquisitions Stick Is The Man Who Is Always Achieving And Advancing Whilst His Neighbors, Spending Most Of Their Time In Relearning What They Once Knew But Have Forgotten, Simply Hold Their Own.

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.

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

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.

The Last Peculiarity Of Consciousness To Which Attention Is To Be Drawn In This First Rough Description Of Its Stream Is That It Is Always Interested More In One Part Of Its Object Than In Another, And Welcomes And Rejects, Or Chooses, All The While It Thinks.

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 Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

Whilst Part Of What We Perceive Comes Through Our Senses From The Object Before Us, Another Part (and It May Be The Larger Part) Always Comes Out Of Our Own Mind.

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There Is No Doubt That Healthy-mindedness Is Inadequate As A Philosophical Doctrine, Because The Evil Facts Which It Refuses Positively To Account For Are A Genuine Portion Of Reality; And They May After All Be The Best Key To Life's Significance, And Possibly The Only Openers Of Our Eyes To The Deepest Levels Of Truth.

[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.

The Teachers Of This Country, One May Say, Have Its Future In Their Hands.

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

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

The Total Mental Efficiency Of A Man Is The Resultant Of The Working Together Of All His Faculties. He Is Too Complex A Being For Any One Of Them To Have The Casting Vote. If Any One Of Them Do Have The Casting Vote, It Is More Likely To Be The Strength Of His Desire And Passion, The Strength Of The Interest He Takes In What Is Proposed. Concentration, Memory, Reasoning Power, Inventiveness, Excellence Of The Senses, All Are Subsidiary To This.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Feed The Growing Human Being, Feed Him With The Sort Of Experience For Which From Year To Year He Shows A Natural Craving, And He Will Develop In Adult Life A Sounder Sort Of Mental Tissue, Even Though He May Seem To Be 'wasting' A Great Deal Of His Growing Time, In The Eyes Of Those For Whom The Only Channels Of Learning Are Books And Verbally Communicated Information.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Know That You, Ladies And Gentlemen, Have A Philosophy, Each And All Of You, And That The Most Interesting And Important Thing About You Is The Way In Which It Determines The Perspective In Your Several Worlds.

I Do Indeed Disbelieve That We Or Any Other Mortal Men Can Attain On A Given Day To Absolutely Incorrigible And Unimprovable Truth About Such Matters Of Fact As Those With Which Religions Deal. But I Reject This Dogmatic Ideal Not Out Of A Perverse Delight In Intellectual Instability. I Am No Lover Of Disorder And Doubt As Such. Rather Do I Fear To Lose Truth By This Pretension To Possess It Already Wholly.

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.

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

If It Works, It's True.

Religion, Therefore, As I Now Ask You Arbitrarily To Take It, Shall Mean For Us The Feelings, Acts, And Experiences Of Individual Men In Their Solitude, So Far As They Apprehend Themselves To Stand In Relation To Whatever They May Consider The Divine. Since The Relation May Be Either Moral, Physical, Or Ritual, It Is Evident That Out Of Religion In The Sense In Which We Take It, Theologies, Philosophies, And Ecclesiastical Organizations May Secondarily Grow.

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.

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

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.

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

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

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.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

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.

It Is Not Probable That The Reader Will Be Satisfied With Any Of These Solutions, And Contemporary Philosophers, Even Rationalistically Minded Ones, Have On The Whole Agreed That No One Has Intelligibly Banished The Mystery Of Fact.

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.

Our Minds Thus Grow In Spots; And Like Grease-spots, The Spots Spread. But We Let Them Spread As Little As Possible: We Keep Unaltered As Much Of Our Old Knowledge, As Many Of Our Old Prejudices And Beliefs, As We Can. We Patch And Tinker More Than We Renew. The Novelty Soaks In; It Stains The Ancient Mass; But It Is Also Tinged By What Absorbs It.

Great Indeed Is Fear; But It Is Not, As Our Military Enthusiasts Believe And Try To Make Us Believe, The Only Stimulus Known For Awakening The Higher Ranges Of Men's Spiritual Energy.

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

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

To Some Of Us The Thought Of God Is Like A Sort Of Quiet Music Playing In The Background Of The Mind.

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

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

A Beethoven String-quartet Is Truly, As Some One Has Said, A Scraping Of Horses' Tails On Cats' Bowels, And May Be Exhaustively Described In Such Terms; But The Application Of This Description In No Way Precludes The Simultaneous Applicability Of An Entirely Different Description.

There Are 3 Rules To Follow If You Want To Change; (1) Start Immediately, (2) Do It Flamboyantly, (3) No Exceptions.

The Perfect Stillness Of The Night Was Thrilled By A More Solemn Silence. The Darkness Held A Presence That Was All The More Felt Because It Was Not Seen. I Could Not Any More Have Doubted That He Was There Than That I Was. Indeed, I Felt Myself To Be, If Possible, The Less Real Of The Two.

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

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.

Compared To What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Physical And Mental Resources. Stating The Thing Broadly, The Human Individual Thus Lives Far Within His Limits. He Possesses Power Of Various Sorts Which He Habitually Fails To Use.

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

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James Anthony Froude

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