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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.

-William James

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The Mind, In Short,

William James

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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.

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If We Claim Only Reasonable Probability, It Will Be As Much As Men Who Love The Truth Can Ever At Any Given Moment Hope To Have Within Their Grasp.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 Perfection Of Rottenness.

'facts' Are The Bounds Of Human Knowledge, Set For It, Not By It.

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.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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

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.

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

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.

What Holds Attention Determines Action.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

An Idea, To Be Suggestive, Must Come To The Individual With The Force Of Revelation.

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

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

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

Our Acts Of Voluntary Attending, As Brief And Fitful As They Are, Are Nevertheless Momentous And Critical, Determining Us, As They Do, To Higher Or Lower Destinies.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

True Ideas Lead Us Into Useful Verbal And Conceptual Quarters As Well As Directly Up To Useful Sensible Termini. They Lead To Consistency, Stability And Flowing Human Intercourse.

One Hears Of The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat. What We Now Need To Discover In The Social Realm Is The Moral Equivalent Of War: Something Heroic That Will Speak To Men As Universally As War Does, And Yet Will Be As Compatible With Their Spiritual Selves As War Has Proved Itself To Be Incompatible.

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

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

Success Plus Self-esteem Equals Pretensions.

Congratulations

From All These Facts There Emerges A Very Simple Abstract Program For The Teacher To Follow In Keeping The Attention Of The Child: Begin With The Line Of His Native Interests, And Offer Him Objects That Have Some Immediate Connection With These.

Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

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.

The Hell To Be Endured Hereafter, Of Which Theology Tells, Is No Worse Than The Hell We Make For Ourselves In This World By Habitually Fashioned Our Characters In The Wrong Way.

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

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision.

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

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

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

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

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

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

To Study The Abnormal Is The Best Way Of Understanding The Normal.

Our Ideas Must Agree With Realities, Be Such Realities Concrete Or Abstract

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

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

It Is Only In The Lonely Emergencies Of Life That Our Creed Is Tested: Then Routine Maxims Fail, And We Fall Back On Our Gods.

Faith Branches Off The Highroad Before Reason Begins

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

Great Emergencies And Crises Show Us How Much Greater Our Vital Resources Are Than We Had Supposed.

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

First... A New Theory Is Attacked As Absurd; Then It Is Admitted To Be True, But Obvious And Insignificant; Finally It Is Seen To Be So Important That Its Adversaries Claim That They Themselves Discovered It.

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

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

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision, And For Whom The Lighting Of Every Cigar, The Drinking Of Every Cup, The Time Of Rising And Going To Bed Every Day, And The Beginning Of Every Bit Of Work, Are Subjects Of Express Volitional Deliberation.

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

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.

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

Instinct Leads, Logic Does But Follow.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

From A Pragmatic Point Of View, The Difference Between Living Against A Background Of Foreigness (an Indifferent Universe) And One Of Intimacy (a Benevolent Universe) Means The Difference Between A General Habit Of Wariness And One Of Trust.

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?

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.

Human Beings Are Born Into This Little Span Of Life Of Which The Best Thing Is Its Friendships And Intimacies … And Yet They Leave Their Friendships And Intimacies With No Cultivation, To Grow As They Will By The Roadside, Expecting Them To "keep" By Force Of Mere Inertia.

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

... A Rule Of Thinking Which Would Absolutely Prevent Me From Acknowledging Certain Kinds Of Truth If Those ... Truths Were Really There, Would Be An Irrational Rule.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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

The Belief In Free-will Is Not In The Least Incompatible With The Belief In Providence, Provided You Do Not Restrict The Providence To Fulminating Nothing But Fatal Decrees.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

'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 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.

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

History Is A Bath Of Blood.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Still Theoretically Possible ... Faith Is The Readiness To Act In A Cause The Prosperous Issue Of Which Is Not Certified To Us In Advance.

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.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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

Happiness Comes Of The Capacity To Feel Deeply, To Enjoy Simply, To Think Freely, To Risk Life, To Be Needed. Which Give Happiness. Thomas Jefferson We Never Enjoy Perfect Happiness; Our Most Fortunate Successes Are Mingled With Sadness; Some Anxieties Always Perplex The Reality Of Our Satisfaction.

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.

There Must Be Something Solemn, Serious, And Tender About Any Attitude Which We Denominate Religious. If Glad, It Must Not Grin Or Snicker; If Sad, It Must Not Scream Or Curse.

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

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

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

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.

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

We Can Change Our Circumstances By A Mere Change Of Our Attitude.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

Act The Part And You Will Become The Part.

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

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

Smitten As We Are With The Vision Of Social Righteousness, A God Indifferent To Everything But Adulation, And Full Of Partiality For His Individual Favorites, Lacks An Essential Element Of Largeness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whatever Universe A Professor Believes In Must At Any Rate Be A Universe That Lends Itself To Lengthy Discourse. A Universe Definable In Two Sentences Is Something For Which The Professorial Intellect Has No Use. No Faith In Anything Of That Cheap Kind!

We Must Not Just Patch And Tinker With Life. We Must Keep Renewing It. Embrace Novelty And Uniqueness.

We Divert Our Attention From Disease And Death As Much As We Can; The Slaughterhouses Are Huddled Out Of Sight And Never Mentioned, So That The World We Recognize Officially In Literature And In Society Is A Poetic Fiction Far Handsomer, Cleaner And Better Than The World That Really Is.

Disease And Death

No Living Person Is Sunk So Low As Not To Be Imitated By Somebody.

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

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.

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

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.

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

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

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

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.

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

To Improve The Golden Moment Of Opportunity, And Catch The Good That Is Within Our Reach, Is The Great Art Of Life.

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

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

The Deepest Longing In The Human Breast Is The Desire For Appreciation.

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

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.

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Theoretically Possible.

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

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

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.

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'

What We Really Need The Poet's And Orator's I Help To Keep Alive In Us Is Not, Then, The Common And Gregarious Courage Which Robert Shaw Showed When He Marched With You, Men Of The Seventh Regiment. It Is That More Lonely Courage Which He Showed When He Dropped His Warm Commission In The Glorious Second To Head Your Dubious Fortunes, Negroes Of The Fifty-fourth. That Lonely Kind Of Courage (civic Courage As We Call It In Times Of Peace) Is The Kind Of Valor To Which The Monuments Of Nations Should Most Of All Be Reared.

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

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.

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

The Self-same Atoms Which, Chaotically Dispersed, Made The Nebula, Now, Jammed And Temporarily Caught In Peculiar Positions, Form Our Brains; And The 'evolution' Of Brains, If Understood, Would Be Simply The Account Of How The Atoms Came To Be So Caught And Jammed.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity.

What A Magnificent Land And Race Is This Britain! Everything About Them Is Of Better Quality Than The Corresponding Thing In The U.s.... Yet I Believe (or Suspect) That Ours Is Eventually The Bigger Destiny, If We Can Only Succeed In Living Up To It.

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.

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!.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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

Much Of What We Call Evil Is Due Entirely To The Way Men Take The Phenomenon. It Can So Often Be Converted Into A Bracing And Tonic Good By A Simple Change Of The Sufferer's Inner Attitude From One Of Fear To One Of Fight; Its String Can So Often Depart And Turn Into A Relish When, After Vainly Seeking To Shun It, We Agree To Face About And Bear It.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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

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

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

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 Mind Of Your Own Enemy, The Pupil, Is Working Away From You, As Keenly And Eagerly As Is The Mind Of The Commander On The Other Side From The Scientific General. Just What The Respective Enemies Want And Think, And What They Know Or Do Not Know, Are As Hard Things For The Teachers As For The General To Find Out.

We Are Stereotyped Creatures, Imitators And Copiers Of Our Past Selves.

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.

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!

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Linda Evangelista

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