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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.

-William James

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Romeo Wants Juliet As

William James

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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.

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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.

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

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!.

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

When A Superior Intellect And A Psychopathic Temperament Coalesce In The Same Individual, We Have The Best Possible Condition For The Kind Of Effective Genius That Gets Into The Biographical Dictionaries.

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

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!

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

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

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.

Our Errors Are Surely Not Such Awfully Solemn Things. In A World Where We Are So Certain To Incur Them In Spite Of All Our Caution, A Certain Lightness Of Heart Seems Healthier Than This Excessive Nervousness On Their Behalf.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

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

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

The 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.

The Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

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

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

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

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

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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

What Interest, Zest, Or Excitement Can There Be In Achieving The Right Way, Unless We Are Enabled To Feel That The Wrong Way Is Also A Possible And A Natural Way, Nay, More, A Menacing And An Imminent Way? And What Sense Can There Be In Condemning Ourselves For Taking The Wrong Way, Unless We Need Have Done Nothing Of The Sort, Unless The Right Way Was Open To Us As Well? I Cannot Understand The Willingness To Act, No Matter How We Feel, Without The Belief That Acts Are Really Good And Bad.

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.

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

... 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.

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.

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Making A Difference

Truth In Our Ideas Means Their Power To Work.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Most People Never Run Far Enough On Their First Wind To Find Out They've Got A Second.

Inspirational Sports

The Desire To Gain Wealth And The Fear To Lose It Are Our Chief Breeders Of Cowardice And Propagators Of Corruption.

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.

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

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.

Life Feels Like A Real Fight - As If There Were Something Really Wild In The Universe Which We, With All Our Idealities And Faithfulnesses, Are Needed To Redeem.

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 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.

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.

A Man May Not Achieve Everything He Has Dreamed, But He Will Never Achieve Anything Great Without Having Dreamed It First.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

Volition . . . Takes Place Only When There Are A Number Of Conflicting Systems Of Ideas, And Depends On Our Having A Complex Field Of Consciousness.

Nature In Her Unfathomable Designs Had Mixed Us Of Clay And Flame, Of Brain And Mind, That The Two Things Hang Indubitably Together And Determine Each Other's Being But How Or Why, No Mortal May Ever Know.

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.

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.

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

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

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

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

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

Metaphysics Means Nothing But An Unusually Obstinate Effort To Think Clearly.

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

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.

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.

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

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

It Is Well For The World That In Most Of Us, By The Age Of Thirty, The Character Has Set Like Plaster, And Will Never Soften Again.

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

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

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.

The Exercise Of Voluntary Attention In The Schoolroom Must Therefore Be Counted One Of The Most Important Points Of Training That Take Place There; And The First-rate Teacher, By The Keenness Of The Remoter Interests Which He Is Able To Awaken, Will Provide Abundant Opportunities For Its Occurrence.

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.

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.

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

The One Who Thinks Over His Experiences Most, And Weaves Them Into Systematic Relations With Each Other, Will Be The One With The Best Memory.

I Am No Lover Of Disorder And Doubt As Such. Rather Do I Fear To Lose Truth By This Pretension To Possess It Already Wholly.

Science As Such Assuredly Has No Authority, For She Can Only Say What Is, Not What Is Not.

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

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

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

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

Our Belief At The Beginning Of A Doubtful Undertaking Is The One Thing That Assures The Successful Outcome Of Any Venture.

The War-function Has Grasped Us So Far; But The Constructive Interests May Some Day Seem No Less Imperative, And Impose On The Individual A Hardly Lighter Burden.

We Want All Our Friends To Tell Us Our Bad Qualities; It Is Only The Particular Ass That Does So Whom We Can't Tolerate.

Cute Friendship

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Owing To The Fact That All Experience Is A Process, No Point Of View Can Ever Be The Last One

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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

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.

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

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

All The Higher, More Penetrating Ideals Are Revolutionary. They Present Themselves Far Less In The Guise Of Effects Of Past Experience Than In That Of Probable Causes Of Future Experience, Factors To Which The Environment And The Lessons It Has So Far Taught Us Must Learn To Bend.

(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.

A Paradise Of Inward Tranquility Seems To Be Faith's Usual Result.

When Two Minds Of A High Order, Interested In Kindred Subjects, Come Together, Their Conversation Is Chiefly Remarkable For The Summariness Of Its Allusions And The Rapidity Of Its Transitions. Before One Of Them Is Half Through A Sentence The Other Knows His Meaning And Replies. ... His Mental Lungs Breathe More Deeply, In An Atmosphere More Broad And Vast.

Real Culture Lives By Sympathies And Admirations, Not By Dislikes And Disdains; Under All Misleading Wrappings It Pounces Unerringly Upon The Human Core.

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

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

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

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

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

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

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.

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity.

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

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

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.

What Do Believers In The Absolute Mean By Saving That Their Belief Affords Them Comfort? They Mean That Since In The Absolute Finite Evil Is ‘overruled’ Already, We May, Therefore, Whenever We Wish, Treat The Temporal As If It Were Potentially The Eternal, Be Sure That We Can Trust Its Outcome, And, Without Sin, Dismiss Our Fear And Drop The Worry Of Our Finite Responsibility. In Short, They Mean That We Have A Right Ever And Anon To Take A Moral Holiday, To Let The World Wag In Its Own Way, Feeling That Its Issues Are In Better Hands Than Ours And Are None Of Our Business.

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

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.

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

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

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Since You Make Evil Or Good By Your Own Thoughts, It Is Your Ruling Of Your Thoughts Which Proves To Be Your Principal Concern.

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

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

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.

A New Opinion Counts As True Just In Proportion As It Gratifies The Individual's Desire To Assimilate The Novel In His Experience To His Beliefs In Stock

In Order To Disprove The Assertion That All Crows Are Black, One White Crow Is Sufficient.

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

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

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.

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

I Am Well Aware How Odd It Must Seem To Some Of You To Hear Me Say That An Idea Is True So Long As To Believe It Is Profitable To Our Lives

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

The Entire Routine Of Our Memorized Acquisitions, For Example, Is A Consequence Of Nothing But The Law Of Contiguity. The Words Of A Poem, The Formulas Of Trigonometry, The Facts Of History, The Properties Of Material Things, Are All Known To Us As Definite Systems Or Groups Of Objects Which Cohere In An Order Fixed By Innumerable Iterations, And Of Which Any One Part Reminds Us Of The Others.

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.

Why Should We Think Upon Things That Are Lovely? Because Thinking Determines Life. It Is A Common Habit To Blame Life Upon The Environment. Environment Modifies Life But Does Not Govern Life. The Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

If The Topic Be Highly Abstract, Show Its Nature By Concrete Examples. If It Be Unfamiliar, Trace Some Point Of Analogy In It With The Known. If It Be Inhuman, Make It Figure As Part Of A Story. If It Be Difficult, Couple Its Acquisition With Some Prospect Of Personal Gain. Above All Things, Make Sure That It Shall Run Through Certain Inner Changes, Since No Unvarying Object Can Possibly Hold The Mental Field For Long.

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.

Most Men's Friendships Are Too Inarticulate.

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

Whenever Two People Meet, There Are Really Six People Present. There Is Each Man As He Sees Himself, Each Man As The Other Person Sees Him, And Each Man As He Really Is.

My Thinking Is First And Last And Always For The Sake Of My Doing, And I Can Only Do One Thing At A Time.

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

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

As The Brain-changes Are Continuous, So Do All These Consciousnesses Melt Into Each Other Like Dissolving Views. Properly They Are But One Protracted Consciousness, One Unbroken Stream.

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

The 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.

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

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

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

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

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can...in The Acquisition Of A New Habit, We Must Take Car To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided Initiative As Possible. Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life.

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.

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

Cramming Seeks To Stamp Things In By Intense Application Immediately Before The Ordeal. But A Thing Thus Learned Can Form But Few Associations.

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

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 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.

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.

A Good Hypothesis In Science Must Have Other Properties Than Those Of The Phenomenon It Is Immediately Invoked To Explain, Otherwise It Is Not Prolific Enough.

You Can't Out-perform Your Self-image.

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

Success Plus Self-esteem Equals Pretensions.

Congratulations

Selection Is The Very Keel On Which Our Mental Ship Is Built. And In This Case Of Memory Its Utility Is Obvious. If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing.

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.

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

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.

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

All The Daily Routine Of Life, Our Dressing And Undressing, The Coming And Going From Our Work Or Carrying Through Of Its Various Operations, Is Utterly Without Mental Reference To Pleasure And Pain, Except Under Rarely Realized Conditions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Few People Have Definitely Articulated Philosophies Of Their Own. But Almost Everyone Has His Own Peculiar Sense Of A Certain Total Character In The Universe, And Of The Inadequacy Of Fully To Match It [to] The Peculiar Systems That He Knows.

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

Since Belief Is Measured By Action, He Who Forbids Us To Believe Religion To Be True, Necessarily Also Forbids Us To Act As We Should If We Did Believe It To Be True.

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

You May Not Get Everything You Dream About, But You Will Never Get Anything You Don't Dream About.

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'.

No Reception Without Reaction, No Impression Without Correlative Expression, -this Is The Great Maxim Which The Teacher Ought Never To Forget.

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

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