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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.

-William James

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There Is No More

William James

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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.

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To Change One's Life: A. Start Immediately B. B. Do It Flamboyantly C. No Exceptions Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted.

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

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.

Divinity Lies All Around Us, But Society Remains Too Hidebound To Accept That Fact...the Mother Sea And The Fountain-head Of All Religions Lies In The Mystical Experiences Of The Individual.

Mystical Experiences

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.

Truth Happens To An Idea. It Becomes True, Is Made True By Events. Its Verity Is In Fact An Event, A Process: The Process Namely Of Its Verifying Itself, Its Veri-fication. Its Validity Is The Process Of Its Valid-ation.

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?

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

There Is A Law In Psychology That If You Form A Picture In Your Mind Of What You Would Like To Be, And You Keep And Hold That Picture There Long Enough, You Will Soon Become Exactly As You Have Been Thinking.

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.

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

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

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.

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

To Spend Life For Something Which Outlasts It.

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

Materialism Means Simply The Denial That The Moral Order Is Eternal, And The Cutting Off Of Ultimate Hopes; Spiritualism Means Theaffirmation Of An Eternal Moral Order And The Letting Loose Of Hope.

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

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.

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

What Holds Attention Determines Action.

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

You Make A Great, Very Great Mistake, If You Think That Psychology, Being The Science Of The Mind's Laws, Is Something From Which You Can Deduce Definite Programmes And Schemes And Methods Of Instruction For Immediate Schoolroom Use.

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

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.

Man Can Alter His Life By Altering His Thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Cute Friendship

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.

Every Claim Creates An Obligation.

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

The First Thing That Intellect Does With An Object Is To Class It With Something Else.

Common Sense And A Sense Of Humor Are The Same Thing, Moving At Different Speeds. A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense, Dancing.

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

The Faculty Of Voluntarily Bringing Back A Wandering Attention, Over And Over Again, Is The Very Root Of Judgment, Character, And Will... An Education Which Should Improve This Faculty Would Be The Education Par Excellence.

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

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

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

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.

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

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.

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.

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

The Trail Of The Human Serpent Is Thus Over Everything.

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

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

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

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.

Pluralism Lets Things Really Exist In The Each-form Or Distributively. Monism Thinks That The All-form Or Collective-unit Form Is The Only Form That Is Rational.

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.

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

Religions Have Approved Themselves; They Have Ministered To Sundry Vital Needs Which They Found Reigning. When They Violated Other Needs Too Strongly, Or When Other Faiths Came Which Served The Same Needs Better, The First Religions Were Supplanted.

At Bottom, The Whole Concern Of Religion Is With The Manner Of Our Acceptance Of The Universe.

Psychology Is A Science, And Teaching Is An Art; And Sciences Never Generate Arts Directly Out Of Themselves.

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

The Instant Field Of The Present Is At All Times What I Call The 'pure' Experience. It Is Only Virtually Or Potentially Either Object Or Subject As Yet.

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

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.

Geniuses Are Commonly Believed To Excel Other Men In Their Power Of Sustained Attention . . . But It Is Their Genius Making Them Attentive, Not Their Attention Making Geniuses Of Them.

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.

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.

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

The Drunken Consciousness Is One Bit Of The Mystic Consciousness, And Our Total Opinion Of It Must Find Its Place In Our Opinion Of That Larger Whole.

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.

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

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.

We And God Have Business With Each Other, And In Opening Ourselves To God's Influence Our Deepest Destiny Is Fulfilled.

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.

The Greatest Discovery Of The 19th Century Was Not In The Realm Of The Physical Sciences, But The Power Of The Subconscious Mind Touched By Faith. Any Individual Can Tap Into An Eternal Reservoir Of Power That Will Enable Them To Overcome Any Problem That May Arise. All Weaknesses Can Be Overcome, Bodily Healing, Financial Independence, Spiritual Awakening, And Prosperity Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. This Is The Superstructure Of Happiness.

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

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.

We [may] Answer The Question: "why Is Snow White?" By Saying, "for The Same Reason That Soap-suds Or Whipped Eggs Are White"-in Other Words, Instead Of Giving The Reason For A Fact, We Give Another Example Of The Same Fact. This Offering A Similar Instance, Instead Of A Reason, Has Often Been Criticised As One Of The Forms Of Logical Depravity In Men. But Manifestly It Is Not A Perverse Act Of Thought, But Only An Incomplete One. Furnishing Parallel Cases Is The Necessary First Step Towards Abstracting The Reason Imbedded In Them All.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

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

The Aim Of A College Education Is To Teach You To Know A Good Man When You See One.

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

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.

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

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

Hardly Ever Can A Youth Transferred To The Society Of His Betters Unlearn The Nasality And Other Vices Of Speech Bred In Him By The Associations Of His Growing Years. Hardly Ever, Indeed, No Matter How Much Money There Be In His Pocket, Can He Ever Learn To Dress Like A Gentleman-born. The Merchants Offer Their Wares As Eagerly To Him As To The Veriest Swell, But He Simply Cannot Buy The Right Things.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Fear Of Life In One Form Or Another Is The Great Thing To Exorcise.

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

Consciousness... Does Not Appear To Itself Chopped Up In Bits. Such Words As 'chain' Or 'train' Do Not Describe It Fitly As It Presents Itself In The First Instance. It Is Nothing Jointed; It Flows. A 'river' Or A 'stream' Are The Metaphors By Which It Is Most Naturally Described. In Talking Of It Hereafter, Let Us Call It The Stream Of Thought, Of Consciousness, Or Of Subjective Life. Source Of The Expression 'stream Of Consciousness'.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Man Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

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

Round About The Accredited And Orderly Facts Of Every Science There Ever Floats A Sort Of Dust-cloud Of Exceptional Observations, Of Occurrences Minute And Irregular And Seldom Met With, Which It Always Proves More Easy To Ignore Than To Attend To... Anyone Will Renovate His Science Who Will Steadily Look After The Irregular Phenomena, And When Science Is Renewed, Its New Formulas Often Have More Of The Voice Of The Exceptions In Them Than Of What Were Supposed To Be The Rules.

There Are No Differences But Differences Of Degree Between Different Degrees Of Difference And No Difference.

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

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

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

Creatures Extremely Low In The Intellectual Scale May Have Conception. All That Is Required Is That They Should Recognize The Same Experience Again. A Polyp Would Be A Conceptual Thinker If A Feeling Of 'hello! Thingumbob Again!' Ever Flitted Through Its Mind.

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

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

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

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 Function Of Ignoring, Of Inattention, Is As Vital A Factor In Mental Progress As The Function Of Attention Itself.

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

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!

An Educated Memory Depends On An Organized System Of Associations; And Its Goodness Depends On Two Of Their Peculiarities: First, On The Persistency Of The Associations; And, Second, On Their Number.

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

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.

If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing. It Would Take Us As Long To Recall A Space Of Time As It Took The Original Time To Elapse, And We Should Never Get Ahead With Our Thinking. All Recollected Times Undergo, Accordingly, What M. Ribot Calls Foreshortening; And This Foreshortening Is Due To The Omission Of An Enormous Number Of Facts Which Filled Them.

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

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

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

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

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

If You Want To Change Your Life, Do It Flamboyantly And Start Immediately.

Changing Your Life

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.

...by Far The Most Usual Way Of Handling Phenomena So Novel That They Would Make For A Serious Rearrangement Of Our Preconceptions Is To Ignore Them Altogether, Or To Abuse Those Who Bear Witness For Them.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

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

I Know That You, Ladies And Gentlemen, Have A Philosophy, Each And All Of You, And That The Most Interesting And Important Thing About You Is The Way In Which It Determines The Perspective In Your Several Worlds.

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.

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.

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

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

Making A Difference

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.

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

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

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

Despair Lames Most People, But It Wakes Others Fully Up.

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

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.

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

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

Each Of Us Literally Chooses, By His Way Of Attending To Things, What Sort Of Universe He Shall Appear To Himself To Inhabit.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World We See That Seems So Insane Is The Result Of A Belief System That Is Not Working. To Perceive The World Differently, We Must Be Willing To Change Our Belief System, Let The Past Slip Away, Expand Our Sense Of Now, And Dissolve The Fear In Our Minds.

Let Sanguine Healthy-mindedness Do Its Best With Its Strange Power Of Living In The Moment And Ignoring And Forgetting, Still The Evil Background Is Really There To Be Thought Of, And The Skull Will Grin In At The Banquet.

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

In The Last Analysis, Then, We Believe That We All Know And Think About And Talk About The Same World Because We Believe Our Percepts Are Possessed By Us In Common

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

The Intellectual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of Conceptual Order For The Perceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

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

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

In Youth We May Have An Absolutely New Experience, Subjective Or Objective, Every Hour Of The Day. Apprehension Is Vivid, Retentiveness Strong, And Our Recollections Of That Time, Like Those In A Time Spent In Rapid And Interesting Travel, Are Of Something Intricate, Multitudinous, And Long-drawn-out. But As Each Passing Year Converts Some Of This Experience Into Automatic Routine Which We Hardly Note At All, The Days And The Weeks Smooth Themselves Out In Recollection To A Contentless Unit, And The Years Grow Hollow And Collapse.

New Experiences

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.

Be Patient And Sympathetic With The Type Of Mind That Cuts A Poor Figure In Examinations. It May, In The Long Examination Which Life Sets Us, Come Out In The End In Better Shape Than The Glib And Ready Reproducer, Its Passions Being Deeper, Its Purposes More Worthy, Its Combining Power Less Commonplace, And Its Total Mental Output Consequently More Important.

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.

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

Man's Chief Difference From The Brutes Lies In The Exuberant Excess Of His Subjective Propensities His Preeminence Over Them Simply And Solely In The Number And In The Fantastic And Unnecessary Character Of His Wants, Physical, Moral, Aesthetic, And Intellectual. Had His Whole Life Not Been A Quest For The Superfluous, He Would Never Have Established Himself As Inexpugnably As He Has Done In The Necessary.

...these Healers...my Intellect Has Been Unable To Assimilate Their Theories....but Their Facts Are Patent And Startling; And Anything That Interferes With The Multiplication Of Such Facts, And With Our Freest Opportunity Of Observing And Studying Them, Will, I Believe, Be A Public Calamity.

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

Invention, Using The Term Most Broadly, And Imitation, Are The Two Legs, So To Call Them, On Which The Human Race Historically Has Walked.

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

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

I Am Only A Philosopher, And There Is Only One Thing That A Philosopher Can Be Relied On To Do, And That Is, To Contradict Other Philosophers.

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.

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.

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

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.

Who Does Not See That We Are Likely To Ascertain The Distinctive Significance Of Religious Melancholy And Happiness, Or Of Religious Trances, Far Better By Comparing Them As Conscientiously As We Can With Other Varieties Of Melancholy, Happiness, And Trance, Than By Refusing To Consider Their Place In Any More General Series, And Treating Them As If They Were Outside Of Nature's Order Altogether?

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

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

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.

The Great Use Of Life Is To Spend It For Something That Will Outlast It." "this Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It." "believe That Life Is Worth Living And Your Belief Will Help Create The Fact.

Inspirational Life

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

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

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.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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.

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