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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'

-William James

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Our Theories Are Wedged

William James

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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'

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We Have To Live Today By What Truth We Can Get Today And Be Ready Tomorrow To Call It Falsehood.

What Holds Attention Determines Action.

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

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

Making A Difference

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

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.

How Can The Moribund Old Man Reason Back To Himself The Romance, The Mystery, The Imminence Of Great Things With Which Our Old Earth Tingled For Him In The Days When He Was Young And Well?

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.

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity Successful Men Act As Though They Have Accomplished Or Are Enjoying Something. Soon It Becomes A Reality. Act, Look, Feel Successful, Conduct Yourself Accordingly, And You Will Be Amazed At The Positive Results.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

General Scepticism Is The Live Mental Attitude Of Refusing To Conclude. It Is A Permanent Torpor Of The Will, Renewing Itself In Detail Towards Each Successive Thesis That Offers, And You Can No More Kill It Off By Logic Than You Can Kill Off Obstinacy Or Practical Joking.

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.

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

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

The Absolute Things, The Last Things, The Overlapping Things, Are The Truly Philosophic Concerns; All Superior Minds Feel Seriously About Them, And The Mind With The Shortest Views Is Simply The Mind Of The More Shallow Man.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Lets Take Full Advantage Of This Discovery

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When We Of The So-called Better Classes Are Scared As Men Were Never Scared In History At Material Ugliness And Hardship; When We Put Off Marriage Until Our House Can Be Artistic, And Quake At The Thought Of Having A Child Without A Bank-account And Doomed To Manual Labor, It Is Time For Thinking Men To Protest Against So Unmanly And Irreligious A State Of Opinion.

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

It Is Very Important That Teachers Should Realize The Importance Of Habit.

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.

My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Pluralism Lets Things Really Exist In The Each-form Or Distributively. Monism Thinks That The All-form Or Collective-unit Form Is The Only Form That Is Rational.

Each Of Us Is In Fact What He Is Almost Exclusively By Virtue Of His Imitative-ness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Truth Happens To An Idea. It Becomes True, Is Made True By Events. Its Verity Is In Fact An Event, A Process: The Process Namely Of Its Verifying Itself, Its Veri-fication. Its Validity Is The Process Of Its Valid-ation.

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

Science, Like Life, Feeds On Its Own Decay. New Facts Burst Old Rules; Then Newly Divined Conceptions Bind Old And New Together Into A Reconciling Law.

Many Persons Nowadays Seem To Think That Any Conclusion Must Be Very Scientific If The Arguments In Favor Of It Are Derived From Twitching Of Frogs' Legs (especially If The Frogs Are Decapitated) And That, On The Other Hand, Any Doctrine Chiefly Vouched For By The Feelings Of Human Beings (with Heads On Their Shoulders) Must Be Benighted And Superstitious.

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

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.

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

Tell Him To Live By Yes And No - Yes To Everything Good, No To Everything Bad.

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.

We With Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea, Or Like Trees In The Forest... But The Trees Also Commingle Their Roots In The Darkness Underground.

The Study A Posteriori Of The Distribution Of Consciousness Shows It To Be Exactly Such As We Might Expect In An Organ Added For The Sake Of Steering A Nervous System Grown Too Complex To Regulate Itself.

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.

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.

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.

Touch Is The Alpha And Omega Of Affection.

Alpha And Omega

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.

... Religious Experience, As We Have Studied It, Cannot Be Cited As Unequivocally Supporting The Infinitist Belief. The Only Thingthat It Unequivocally Testifies To Is That We Can Experience Union With Something Larger Than Ourselves And In That Union Find Our Greatest Peace.

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

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

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.

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'.

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.

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.

Wisdom Is Learning What To Overlook.

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

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

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

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

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.

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

Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal.

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

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

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

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

Truth In Our Ideas Means Their Power To Work.

The Ideas Gained By Men Before They Are Twenty-five Are Practically The Only Ideas They Shall Have In Their Lives.

In This Real World Of Sweat And Dirt, It Seems To Me That When A View Of Things Is 'noble,' That Ought To Count As Presumption Against Its Truth, And As A Philosophic Disqualification. The Prince Of Darkness May Be A Gentleman, As We Are Told He Is, But Whatever The God Of Earth And Heaven Is, He Can Surely Be No Gentleman.

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.

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

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can, And As Carefully Guard Against The Growing Into Ways That Are Likely To Be Disadvantageous.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

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

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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

[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.

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

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

There Is No Being Capable Of A Spiritual Life Who Does Not Have Within Him A Jungle. Where The Wolf Constantly Howls And The Obscene Bird Of Night Chatters Endlessly.

The Pragmatist Turns Away From Abstraction And Insufficiency, From Verbal Solutions, From Bad A Priori Reasons, From Fixed Principles, Closed Systems, And Pretended Absolutes And Origins. He Turns Toward Concreteness And Adequacy, Towards Facts, Towards Action, And Towards Power.

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

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

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

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.

There Is A Stream, A Succession Of States, Or Waves, Or Fields (or Whatever You Please To Call Them), Of Knowledge, Of Feeling, Of Desire, Of Deliberation, Etc., That Constantly Pass And Repass, And That Constitute Our Inner Life.

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

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

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

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

The Mind Is Made Up By What It Feeds Upon.

An Unlearned Carpenter Of My Acquaintance Once Said In My Hearing: "there Is Very Little Difference Between One Man And Another; But What Little There Is, Is Very Important." This Distinction Seems To Me To Go To The Root Of The Matter.

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

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

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

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

...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.

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

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

We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

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.

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.

Success Plus Self-esteem Equals Pretensions.

Congratulations

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

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

In Teaching, You Must Simply Work Your Pupil Into Such A State Of Interest In What You Are Going To Teach Him That Every Other Object Of Attention Is Banished From His Mind; Then Reveal It To Him So Impressively That He Will Remember The Occasion To His Dying Day; And Finally Fill Him With Devouring Curiosity To Know What The Next Steps In Connection With The Subject Are.

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

The Simplest Rudiment Of Mystical Experience Would Seem To Be That Deepened Sense Of The Significance Of A Maxim Or Formula Which Occasionally Sweeps Over One.

Mystical Experiences

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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!.

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.

We Have Nothing To Do But To Receive, Resting Absolutely Upon The Merit, Power, And Love Of Our Redeemer.

Our Intelligence Cannot Wall Itself Up Alive, Like A Pupa In A Chrysalis. It Must At Any Cost Keep On Speaking Terms With The Universe That Engendered It.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Changing Your Life

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

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

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

Do Every Day Or Two Something For No Other Reason Than Its Difficulty.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Agisci Come Se Quel Che Fai, Facesse La Differenza. La Fa!

Choose A Self And Stand By It.

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

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

Most Men's Friendships Are Too Inarticulate.

Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life. Each Lapse Is Like The Letting Fall Of A Ball Of String Which One Is Carefully Winding Up; A Single Slip Undoes More Than A Great Many Turns Will Wind Again.

We Have Grown Literally Afraid To Be Poor. We Despise Anyone Who Elects To Be Poor In Order To Simplify And Save His Inner Life. If He Does Not Join The General Scramble And Pant With The Money-making Street, We Deem Him Spiritless And Lacking In Ambition

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.

The Sway Of Alcohol Over Mankind Is Unquestionably Due To Its Power To Stimulate The Mystical Faculties Of Human Nature, Usually Crushed To Earth By The Cold Facts And Dry Criticisms Of The Sober Hour.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

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

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.

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

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

So Long As Antimilitarists Propose No Substitute For War's Disciplinary Function, No Moral Equivalent Of War, Analogous, As One Might Say, To The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat, So Long They Fail To Realize The Full Inwardness Of The Situation.

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

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.

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

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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