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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.

-William James

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The Mind Of Your

William James

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We, The Lineal Representatives Of The Successful Enactors Of One Scene Of Slaughter After Another, Must, Whatever More Pacific Virtues We May Also Possess, Still Carry About With Us, Ready At Any Moment To Burst Into Flame, The Smoldering And Sinister Traits Of Character By Means Of Which They Lived Through So Many Massacres, Harming Others, But Themselves Unharmed.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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

Habit Is Thus The Enormous Fly-wheel Of Society, Its Most Precious Conservative Agent. It Alone Is What Keeps Us All Within The Bounds Of Ordinance, And Saves The Children Of Fortune From The Envious Uprisings Of The Poor. It Alone Prevents The Hardest And Most Repulsive Walks Of Life From Being Deserted By Those Brought Up To Tread Therein.

Beyond The Very Extreme Of Fatigue And Distress, We May Find Amounts Of Ease And Power We Never Dreamed Ourselves To Own; Sources Of Strength Never Taxed At All Because We Never Push Through The Obstruction

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

The Trail Of The Human Serpent Is Thus Over Everything.

Let Anyone Try, I Will Not Say To Arrest, But To Notice Or To Attend To, The Present Moment Of Time. One Of The Most Baffling Experiences Occurs. Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

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

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

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

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

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

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

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

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

There Are Two Lives, The Natural And The Spiritual, And We Must Lose The One Before We Can Participate In The Other.

Men Are Now Proud Of Belonging To A Conquering Nation, And Without A Murmur They Lay Down Their Persons And Their Wealth, If By So Doing They May Fend Off Subjection.

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

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

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

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.

All Natural Goods Perish. Riches Take Wings; Fame Is A Breath; Love Is A Cheat; Youth And Health And Pleasure Vanish.

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.

History Is A Bath Of Blood.

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.

The Exercise Of Prayer, In Those Who Habitually Exert It, Must Be Regarded By Us Doctors As The Most Adequate And Normal Of All The Pacifiers Of The Mind And Calmers Of The Nerves.

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

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

A Genius Is The Man In Whom You Are Least Likely To Find The Power Of Attending To Anything Insipid Or Distasteful In Itself. He Breaks His Engagements, Leaves His Letters Unanswered, Neglects His Family Duties Incorrigibly, Because He Is Powerless To Turn His Attention Down And Back From Those More Interesting Trains Of Imagery With Which His Genius Constantly Occupies His Mind.

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.

Every Claim Creates An Obligation.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race.

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.

To Spend Life For Something Which Outlasts It.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

There Is No Worse Lie Than A Truth Misunderstood Bu Those Who Hear It.

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

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

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.

Science Must Constantly Be Reminded That Her Purposes Are Not The Only Purposes And That The Order Of Uniform Causation Which She Has Use For, And Is Therefore Right In Postulating, May Be Enveloped In A Wider Order, On Which She Has No Claim At All.

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

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

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.

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 Deepest Principle In Human Nature Is The Craving To Be Appreciated.

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort. We Postpone And Postpone Until Those Smiling Possibilities Are Dead... By Neglecting The Necessary Concrete Labor, By Sparing Ourselves The Little Daily Tax, We Are Positively Digging The Graves Of Our Higher Possibilities.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Equality Is Attainable As Long As You Are Part Of The Majority.

Ninety-nine Hundredths Or, Possibly, Nine Hundred And Ninety-nine Thousandths Of Our Activity Is Purely Automatic And Habitual, From Our Rising In The Morning To Our Lying Down Each Night.

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

No Decision Is, In Itself, A Decision.

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

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

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

Religion, Therefore, As I Now Ask You Arbitrarily To Take It, Shall Mean For Us The Feelings, Acts, And Experiences Of Individual Men In Their Solitude, So Far As They Apprehend Themselves To Stand In Relation To Whatever They May Consider The Divine. Since The Relation May Be Either Moral, Physical, Or Ritual, It Is Evident That Out Of Religion In The Sense In Which We Take It, Theologies, Philosophies, And Ecclesiastical Organizations May Secondarily Grow.

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

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 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.

If Any One Phrase Could Gather Its (religion's) Universal Message, That Phrase Would Be, - All Is Not Vanity In This Universe, Whatever The Appearances May Suggest.

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

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.

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.

Choose A Self And Stand By It.

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.

Positive Images Of The Future Are A Powerful And Magnetic Force... They Draw Us On And Energize Us, Give Us Courage And Will To Take On Important Initiatives. Negative Images Of The Future Also Have A Magnetism. They Pull The Spirit Downward In The Path Of Despair.

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

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

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

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

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

The Baby, Assailed By Eyes, Ears, Nose, Skin, And Entrails At Once, Feels It All As One Great Blooming, Buzzing Confusion.

The Union Of The Mathematician With The Poet, Fervor With Measure, Passion With Correctness, This Surely Is The Ideal.

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

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

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

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.

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.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

One Of The Greatest Discoveries Of Our Time Is That A Man Can Alter The State Of Their Life By Altering The State Of Their Mind.

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

The Transition From Tenseness, Self-responsibility, And Worry, To Equanimity, Receptivity, And Peace, Is The Most Wonderful Of All Those Shiftings Of Inner Equilibrium, Those Changes Of Personal Centre Of Energy, Which I Have Analyzed So Often; And The Chief Wonder Of It Is That It So Often Comes About, Not By Doing, But By Simply Relaxing And Throwing The Burden Down.

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.

Ingenuity In Meeting And Pursuing The Pupil, That Tact For The Concrete Situation, Though They Are The Alpha And Omega Of The Teacher's Art, Are Things To Which Psychology Cannot Help Us In The Least.

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

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

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.

Man Is Essentially The Imitative Animal. His Whole Educabilityand In Fact The Whole History Of Civilization Depend On This Trait, Which His Strong Tendencies To Rivalry, Jealousy, And Acquisitiveness Reinforce.

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

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

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

How To Gain, How To Keep, How To Recover Happiness Is In Fact For Most Men At All Times The Secret Motive Of All They Do, And Of All They Are Willing To Endure.

Or If The Hypothesis Were Offered Us Of A World In Which Messrs. Fourier's And Bellamy's And Morris's Utopias Should All Be Outdone, And Millions Kept Permanently Happy On The One Simple Condition That A Certain Lost Soul On The Far-off Edge Of Things Should Lead A Life Of Lonely Torment, What Except A Specifical And Independent Sort Of Emotion Can It Be Which Would Make Us Immediately Feel, Even Though An Impulse Arose Within Us To Clutch At The Happiness So Offered, How Hideous A Thing Would Be Its Enjoyment When Deliberately Accepted As The Fruit Of Such A Bargain?

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 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.

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.

I Am, Myself, A Very Poor Visualizer And Find That I Can Seldom Call To Mind Even A Single Letter Of The Alphabet In Purely Retinal Terms. I Must Trace The Letter By Running My Mental Eye Over Its Contour In Order That The Image Of It Shall Leave Any Distinctness At All.

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.

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

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

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

The First Thing To Learn In Intercourse With Others Is Non-interference With Their Own Particular Ways Of Being Happy, Provided Those Ways Do Not Assume To Interfere By Violence With Ours.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All. And Often Enough Our Faith Beforehand In An Uncertified Result Is The Only Thing That Makes The Result Come True.

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

True To Her Inveterate Habit, Rationalism Reverts To 'principles,' And Thinks That When An Abstraction Once Is Named, We Own An Oracular Solution.

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

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

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

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

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 Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

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

Truth Lives, In Fact, For The Most Part On A Credit System

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.

Our Volitional Habits Depend, Then, First, On What The Stock Of Ideas Is Which We Have; And, Second, On The Habitual Coupling Of The Several Ideas With Action Or Inaction Respectively.

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Neither Moral Relations Nor The Moral Law Can Swing In Vacuo. Their Only Habitat Can Be A Mind Which Feels Them; And No World Composed Of Merely Physical Facts Can Possibly Be A World To Which Ethical Propositions Apply.

The Strenuous Life Tastes Better

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.

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

The Most Natively Interesting Object To A Man Is His Own Personal Self And Its Fortunes. We Accordingly See That The Moment A Thing Becomes Connected With The Fortunes Of The Self, It Forthwith Becomes An Interesting Thing.

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.

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

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

Intelligence Is A Fixed Goal With Variable Means Of Achieving It.

Our View Of The World Is Truly Shaped By What We Decide To Hear.

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.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

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

A Winner's Attitude: It May Be Difficult, But It's Possible. A Loser's Attitude: It May Be Possible, But It's Too Difficult.

If You Want A Confidence, Act As If You Already Have It. Try The "as If" Technique.

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

To Give The Theory Plenty Of 'rope' And See If It Hangs Itself Eventually Is Better Tactics Than To Choke It Off At The Outset B Abstract Accusations Of Self-contradiction

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

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

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

I Have Often Thought The Best Way To Define A Man's Character Would Be To Seek Out The Particular Mental Or Moral Attitude In Which, When It Comes Upon Him, He Felt Himself Most Deeply And Intensely Active And Alive. At Such Moments There Is A Voice Inside Which Speaks And Says: This Is The Real Me!.

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

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

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

Man Lives In Only One Small Room Of The Enormous House Of His Consciousness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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William Glasser

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