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

-William James

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Science Can Tell Us

William James

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

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

The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Good Teacher Is To Get A Bad Conscience About Her Profession Because She Feels Herself Hopeless As A Psychologist.

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

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

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.

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 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 Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

Of Course, This Has Its Good Side As Well As Its Bad One. As We Become Permanent Drunkards By So May Separate Drinks, So We Become Saints In The Moral, And Authorities And Experts In The Practical And Scientific Spheres, By So Many Separate Acts And Hours Of Work. Let No Youth Have Any Anxiety About The Upshot Of His Education, Whatever The Line Of It May Be. If He Keep Faithfully Busy Each Hour Of The Working Day, He May Safely Leave The Final Result To Itself.

I Am Tired Of The Position Of The Dried-up Critic And Doubter. The Believer Is The True Full Man. (from A Biography Of James By Robert D. Richardson)

The Greatest Empiricists Among Us Are Only Empiricists On Reflection: When Left To Their Instincts, They Dogmatize Like Infallible Popes.

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

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.

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

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.

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

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

I Don't See How An Epigram, Being A Bolt From The Blue, With No Introduction Or Cue, Ever Gets Itself Writ.

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

A Man Of Sense Is Never Discouraged By Difficulties; He Redoubles His Industry And His Diligence, He Perseveres And Infallibly Prevails At Last.

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists. The Two Associated Objects Grow, As It Were, Together; The Interesting Portion Sheds Its Quality Over The Whole; And Thus Things Not Interesting In Their Own Right Borrow An Interest Which Becomes As Real And As Strong As That Of Any Natively Interesting Thing.

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

Even If Matter Could Do Every Outward Thing That God Does, The Idea Of It Would Not Work As Satisfactorily, Because The Chief Callfor A God On Modern Men's Part Is For A Being Who Will Inwardly Recognize Them And Judge Them Sympathetically. Matter Disappoints This Craving Of Our Ego, So God Remains For Most Men The Truer Hypothesis, And Indeed Remains So For Definite Pragmatic Reasons.

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

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.

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

My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To.

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

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.

Human Beings Can Alter Their Lives By Altering Their Attitudes Of Mind.

Our Esteem For Facts Has Not Neutralized In Us All Religiousness. It Is Itself Almost Religious. Our Scientific Temper Is Devout.

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

We Are Mere Bundles Of Habits.

The Unrest Which Keeps The Never Stopping Clock Of Metaphysics Going Is The Thought That The Nonexistence Of This World Is Just As Possible As Its Existence.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

The Question Of Free Will Is Insoluble On Strictly Psychological Grounds.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

New Habits Can Be Launched.

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

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

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

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.

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

It Is As Important To Cultivate Your Silence Power As Your Word Power.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

The Difference Between The First And Second-best Things In Art Absolutely Seems To Escape Verbal Definition -- It Is A Matter Of A Hair, A Shade, An Inward Quiver Of Some Kind -- Yet What Miles Away In The Point Of Preciousness!

Once You Accept An Idea, It's An Idea Whose Time Has Come.

How Many Of Us Persist In A Precipitate Course Which, But For A Moment Of Heedlessness We Might Never Have Entered Upon, Simply Because We Hate To Change Our Minds.

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.

Actions Seems To Follow Feeling, But Really Actions And Feeling Go Together; And By Regulating The Action, Which Is Under The More Direct Control Of The Will, We Can Indirectly Regulate The Feeling, Which Is Not. Thus The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There.

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

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.

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

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

To Kill Time Is Not Murder, It's Suicide.

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

To Suggest Personal Will And Effort To One All Sicklied O'er With The Sense Of Irremediable Impotence Is To Suggest The Most Impossible Of Things. What He Craves Is To Be Consoled In His Very Powerlessness, To Feel That The Spirit Of The Universe Recognizes And Secures Him, All Decaying And Failing As He Is.

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.

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.

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.

We Are Not Only Gregarious Animals, Liking To Be In Sight Of Our Fellows, But We Have An Innate Propensity To Get Ourselves Noticed, And Noticed Favorably, By Our Kind.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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.

O My Bergson, You Are A Magician, And Your Book Is A Marvel, A Real Wonder In The History Of Philosophy . . . In Finishing It I Found . . . Such A Flavor Of Persistent Euphony, As Of A Rich River That Never Foamed Or Ran Thin, But Steadily And Firmly Proceeded With Its Banks Full To The Brim.

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.

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

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

What Excites And Interests The Looker-on At Life, What The Romances And The Statues Celebrate, And The Grim Civic Monuments Remind Us Of, Is The Everlasting Battle Of The Powers Of Light With Those Of Darkness; With Heroism Reduced To Its Bare Chance, Yet Ever And Anon Snatching Victory From The Jaws Of Death.

A Little Cooling Down Of Animal Excitability And Instinct, A Little Loss Of Animal Toughness, A Little Irritable Weakness And Descent Of The Pain-threshold, Will Bring The Worm At The Core Of All Our Usual Springs Of Delight Into Full View, And Turn Us Into Melancholy Metaphysicians.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Considering The Inner Fitness Of Things, One Would Rather Think That The Very First Act Of A Will Endowed With Freedom Should Be To Sustain The Belief In The Freedom Itself.

The Further Limits Of Our Being Plunge, It Seems To Me, Into An Altogether Other Dimension Of Existence From The Sensible And Merely Understandable World. Name It The Mystical Region, Or The Supernatural Region, Whichever You Choose. So Far As Our Ideal Impulses Originate In This Region (and Most Of Them Do Originate In It, For We Find Them Possessing Us In A Way For Which We Cannot Articulately Account), We Belong To It In A More Intimate Sense Than That In Which We Belong To The Visible World, For We Belong In The Most Intimate Sense Wherever Our Ideals Belong.

Procrastination Is Attitude's Natural Assassin. There's Nothing So Fatiguing As An Uncompleted Task

Procrastination

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

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

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

The First Lecture In Psychology That I Ever Heard Was The First I Ever Gave.

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

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

In The Dim Background Of Our Mind We Know Meanwhile What We Ought To Be Doing: Getting Up, Dressing Ourselves, Answering The Person Who Has Spoken To Us, Trying To Make The Next Step In Our Reasoning. But Somehow We Cannot Start.

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

When Happiness Is Actually In Possession, The Thought Of Evil Can No More Acquire The Feeling Of Reality Than The Thought Of Good Can Gain Reality When Melancholy Rules. To The Man Actively Happy, From Whatever Cause, Evil Simply Cannot Then And There Be Believed In.

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

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.

That Reality Is 'independent' Means That There Is Something In Every Experience That Escapes Our Arbitrary Control. If It Be A Sensible Experience It Coerces Our Attention; If A Sequence, We Cannot Invert It; If We Compare Two Terms We Can Come To Only One Result. There Is A Push, An Urgency, Within Our Very Experience, Against Which We Are On The Whole Powerless, And Which Drives Us In A Direction That Is The Destiny Of Our Belief.

Compared With Men, It Is Probable That Brutes Neither Attend To Abstract Characters, Nor Have Associations By Similarity. Their Thoughts Probably Pass From One Concrete Object To Its Habitual Concrete Successor Far More Uniformly Than Is The Case With Us. In Other Words, Their Associations Of Ideas Are Almost Exclusively By Contiguity. So Far, However, As Any Brute Might Think By Abstract Characters Instead Of By Association Of Con Cretes, He Would Have To Be Admitted To Be A Reasoner In The True Human Sense. How Far This May Take Place Is Quite Uncertain.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Wisdom Is Learning What To Overlook.

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.

To Know Psychology, Therefore, Is Absolutely No Guarantee That We Shall Be Good Teacher.

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.

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

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

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

Need And Struggle Are What Excite And Inspire Us; Our Hour Of Triumph Is What Brings The Void. Not The Jews Of The Captivity, But Those Of The Days Of Solomon 's Glory Are Those From Whom The Pessimistic Utterances In Our Bible Come.

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

Man Can Alter His Life By Altering His Thinking.

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

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

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.

Humanism . . . Is Not A Single Hypothesis Or Theorem, And It Dwells On No New Facts. It Is Rather A Slow Shifting In The Philosophic Perspective, Making Things Appear As From A New Centre Of Interest Or Point Of Sight.

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.

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

Far From Being Antecedent Principles That Animate The Process, Law, Language, Truth Are But Abstract Names For Its Results.

Essential Truth, The Truth Of The Intellectualists, The Truth With No One Thinking It, Is Like The Coat That Fits Tho No One Has Ever Tried It On, Like The Music That No Ear Has Listened To. It Is Less Real, Not More Real, Than The Verified Article; And To Attribute A Superior Degree Of Glory To It Seems Little More Than A Piece Of Perverse Abstraction-worship.

The Bottom Of Being Is Left Logically Opaque To Us, A Datum In The Strict Sense Of The Word, Something We Simply Come Upon And Find, And About Which (if We Wish To Act) We Should Pause And Wonder As Little As Possible. In This Confession Lies The Lasting Truth Of Empiricism.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

But It Is The Bane Of Psychology To Suppose That Where Results Are Similar, Processes Must Be The Same. Psychologists Are Too Apt To Reason As Geometers Would, If The Latter Were To Say That The Diameter Of A Circle Is The Same Thing As Its Semi-circumference, Because, Forsooth, They Terminate In The Same Two Points.

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

Our Normal Waking Consciousness, Rational Consciousness As We Call It, Is But One Special Type Of Consciousness, Whilst All About It, Parted From It By The Filmiest Of Screens, There Lie Potential Forms Of Consciousness Entirely Different.

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

To Be Radical, An Empiricism Must Neither Admit Into Its Constructions Any Element That Is Not Directly Experienced, Nor Exclude From Them Any Element That Is Directly Experienced.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

No Decision Is, In Itself, A Decision.

So Our Self-feeling In This World Depends Entirely On What We Back Ourselves To Be And Do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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.

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

The Only Function That One Experience Can Perform Is To Lead Into Another Experience; And The Only Fulfillment We Can Speak Of Isthe Reaching Of A Certain Experienced End. When One Experience Leads To (or Can Lead To) The Same End As Another, They Agree In Function.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Mankind's Common Instinct For Reality Has Always Held The World To Be Essentially A Theatre For Heroism.

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

This Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It.

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

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.

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

As A Rule Reading Fiction Is As Hard To Me As Trying To Hit A Target By Hurling Feathers At It. I Need Resistance To Celebrate!

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

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Marcus Tullius Cicero

Mary Lou Retton

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