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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.

-William James

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Take The Happiest Man,

William James

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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.

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

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

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

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)

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

Wisdom Is Learning What To Overlook.

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

If, Then, You Wish To Insure The Interest Of Your Pupils, There Is Only One Way To Do It; And That Is To Make Certain That They Have Something In Their Minds To Attend With, When You Begin To Talk. That Something Can Consist In Nothing But A Previous Lot Of Ideas Already Interesting In Themselves, And Of Such A Nature That The Incoming Novel Objects Which You Present Can Dovetail Into Them And Form With Them Some Kind Of A Logically Associated Or Systematic Whole.

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.

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 Difference Which Makes No Difference Is No Difference At All.

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.

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

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

All Our Life, So Far As It Has Definite Form, Is But A Mass Of Habits.

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

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

Tension Is A Habit. Relaxing Is A Habit. Bad Habits Can Be Broken, Good Habits Formed.

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

For The Moment, What We Attend To Is Reality.

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

Real Servants Don't Try To Use God For Their Purposes. They Let God Use Them For His Purposes.

Modern War Is So Expensive That We Feel Trade To Be A Better Avenue To Plunder; But Modern Man Inherits All The Innate Pugnacity And All The Love Of Glory Of His Ancestors.

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

If Evolution And The Survival Of The Fittest Be True At All, The Destruction Of Prey And Of Human Rivals Must Have Been Among The Most Important. . . . It Is Just Because Human Bloodthirstiness Is Such A Primitive Part Of Us That It Is So Hard To Eradicate, Especially When A Fight Or A Hunt Is Promised As Part Of The Fun.

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.

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 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.

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

So With The Man Who Has Daily Inured Himself To Habits Of Concentrated Attention, Energetic Volition, And Self-denial In Unnecessary Things. He Will Stand Like A Tower When Everything Rocks Around Him, And When His Softer Fellow-mortals Are Winnowed Like Chaff In The Blast.

The 'i Think' Which Kant Said Must Be Able To Accompany All My Objects, Is The 'i Breathe' Which Actually Does Accompany Them.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

Our Life Is Always Deeper Than We Know, Is Always More Divine Than It Seems, And Hence We Are Able To Survive Degradations And Despairs Which Otherwise Must Engulf Us.

Out Of Time We Cut 'days' And 'nights', 'summers' And 'winters.' We Say What, Each Part Of The Sensible Continuum Is, And All These Abstract Whats Are Concepts. The Intelletual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of A Conceptual Order For The Persceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

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

Inspirational Sports

If The Grace Of God Miraculously Operates, It Probably Operates Through The Subliminal Door.

Need And Struggle Are What Excite And Inspire Us; Our Hour Of Triumph Is What Brings The Void.

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 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.

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

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

Every Sort Of Energy And Endurance, Of Courage And Capacity For Handling Life's Evils, Is Set Free In Those Who Have Religious Faith.

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

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.

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.

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

Procrastination

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

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge. There Is No More Contemptible Type Of Human Character Than That Of The Nerveless Sentimentalist And Dreamer, Who Spends His Life In A Weltering Sea Of Sensibility And Emotion, But Who Never Does A Manly Concrete Deed.

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

The Greatest Weapon Against Stress Is Our Ability To Choose One Thought Over Another.

If Any Organism Fails To Fulfill Its Potentialities, It Becomes Sick.

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.

The Stream Of Thought Flows On; But Most Of Its Segments Fall Into The Bottomless Abyss Of Oblivion. Of Some, No Memory Survives The Instant Of Their Passage. Of Others, It Is Confined To A Few Moments, Hours Or Days. Others, Again, Leave Vestiges Which Are Indestructible, And By Means Of Which They May Be Recalled As Long As Life Endures.

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.

Men Habitually Use Only A Small Part Of The Power Which They Actually Possess.

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.

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.

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.

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

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

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.

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

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.

But Petitional Prayer Is Only One Department Of Prayer; And If We Take The Word In The Wider Sense As Meaning Every Kind Of Inward Communion Or Conversation With The Power Recognized As Divine, We Can Easily See That Scientific Criticism Leaves It Untouched. Prayer In This Wide Sense Is The Very Soul And Essence Of Religion.

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

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

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

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

We Are All Ready To Be Savage In Some Cause. The Difference Between A Good Man And A Bad One Is The Choice Of The Cause.

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.

As We Take, In Fact, A General View Of The Wonderful Stream Of Our Consciousness, What Strikes Us First Is This Different Pace Of Its Parts. Like A Bird 's Life, It Seems To Be Made Of An Alternation Of Flights And Perchings.

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.

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.

Religion, Whatever It Is, Is A Man's Total Reaction Upon Life.

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

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.

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'

To Begin With, Our Knowledge Grows In Spots. The Spots May Be Large Or Small, But The Knowledge Ever Grows All Over... What You First Gain From Them Is Probably A Small Amount Of New Information, A Few New Definitions, Or Distinctions, Or Points Of View. But While These Special Ideas Are Being Added, The Rest Of Your Knowledge Stands Still, And Only Gradually Will You 'line Up' Your Previous Opinions With The Novelties I Am Trying To Instil, And Modify To Some Slight Degree Their Mass.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

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

Faith Branches Off The Highroad Before Reason Begins

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.

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

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

The Greatest Enemy Of Any One Of Our Truths May Be The Rest Of Our Truths.

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

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

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

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

Do Something Everyday For No Other Reason Than You Would Rather Not Do It, So That When The Hour Of Dire Need Draws Nigh, It May Find You Not Unnerved And Untrained To Stand The Test.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

You Do Not Sing Because You're Happy, You're Happy Because You Sing.

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

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.

The Lunatic's Visions Of Horror Are All Drawn From The Material Of Daily Fact.

Success Plus Self-esteem Equals Pretensions.

Congratulations

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

(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.

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 Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

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 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.

It Is As If There Were In The Human Consciousness A Sense Of Reality, A Feeling Of Objective Presence, A Perception Of What We May Call Something There, More Deep And More General Than Any Of The Special And Particular Senses By Which The Current Psychology Supposes Existent Realities To Be Originally Revealed.

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

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

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

To Give Up Pretensions Is As Blessed A Relief As To Get Them Ratified.

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

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

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.

The Most Ancient Parts Of Truth . . . Also Once Were Plastic. They Also Were Called True For Human Reasons. They Also Mediated Between Still Earlier Truths And What In Those Days Were Novel Observations. Purely Objective Truth, Truth In Whose Establishment The Function Of Giving Human Satisfaction In Marrying Previous Parts Of Experience With Newer Parts Played No Role Whatsoever, Is Nowhere To Be Found. The Reasons Why We Call Things True Is The Reason Why They Are True, For To Be True Means Only To Perform This Marriage-function.

Truth In Our Ideas Means Their Power To Work.

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

The Teacher's Prime Concern Should Be To Ingrain Into The Pupil That Assortment Of Habits That Shall Be Most Useful To Him Throughout Life. Education Is For Behavior, And Habits Are The Stuff Of Which Behavior Consists.

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.

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

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

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

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

If 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!

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.

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.

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

When Thoughts Do Not Neutralize An Undesirable Emotion, Action Will.

Is Life Worth Living? It All Depends On The Liver.

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!

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.

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

Intellectualism' Is The Belief That Our Mind Comes Upon A World Complete In Itself, And Has The Duty Of Ascertaining Its Contents; But Has No Power Of Re-determining Its Character, For That Is Already Given.

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

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

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.

A Remarkable Parallel, Which I Think Has Never Been Noticed, Obtains Between The Facts Of Social Evolution On The One Hand, And Of Zological Evolution As Expounded By Mr. Darwin On The Other.

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.

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

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

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.

Pretend What We May, The Whole Man Within Us Is At Work When We Form Our Philosophical Opinions.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Seize The Very First Possible Opportunity To Act On Every Resolution You Make, And On Every Emotional Prompting You May Experience In The Direction Of The Habits You Aspire To Gain.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Philosophy Is At Once The Most Sublime And The Most Trivial Of Human Pursuits.

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

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

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

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

Making A Difference

Voices Of The Glorified Urge Us Onward. They Who Have Passed From The Semblances Of Time To The Realities Of Eternity Call Upon Us To Advance. The Rest That Awaits Us Invites Us Forward. We Do Not Pine For Our Rest Before God Wills It. We Long For No Inglorious Rest. We Are Thankful Rather For The Invaluable Training Of Difficulty, The Loving Discipline Of Danger And Strife. Yet In The Midst Of It All The Prospect Of Rest Invites Us Heavenward. Through All, And Above All, God Cries, "go Forward!" "come Up Higher!

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.

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