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We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

-William James

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We Are All Potentially

William James

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We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

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You Perceive Now, My Friends, What Your General Or Abstract Duty Is As Teachers. Although You Have To Generate In Your Pupils A Large Stock Of Ideas, Any One Of Which May Be Inhibitory, Yet You Must Also See To It That No Habitual Hesitancy Or Paralysis Of The Will Ensues, And That The Pupil Still Retains His Power Of Vigorous Action.

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

The Lunatic's Visions Of Horror Are All Drawn From The Material Of Daily Fact. Our Civilization Is Founded On The Shambles, And Every Individual Existence Goes Out In A Lonely Spasm Of Helpless Agony.

Philosophy Lives In Words, But Truth And Fact Well Up Into Our Lives In Ways That Exceed Verbal Formulation. There Is In The Living Act Of Perception Always Something That Glimmers And Twinkles And Will Not Be Caught, And For Which Reflection Comes Too Late.

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

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

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.

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.

We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

To Plead The Organic Causation Of A Religious State Of Mind, Then, In Refutation Of Its Claim To Possess Superior Spiritual Value, Is Quite Illogical And Arbitrary, Unless One Have Already Worked Out In Advance Some Psycho-physical Theory Connecting Spiritual Values In General With Determinate Sorts Of Physiological Change. Otherwise None Of Our Thoughts And Feelings, Not Even Our Scientific Doctrines, Not Even Our Dis -beliefs, Could Retain Any Value As Revelations Of The Truth, For Every One Of Them Without Exception Flows From The State Of Their Possessor's Body At The Time.

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

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.

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

True Ideas Are Those That We Can Assimilate, Validate, Corroborate, And Verify. False Ideas Are Those That We Cannot. That Is The Practical Difference It Makes To Us To Have True Ideas; That Therefore Is The Meaning Of Truth, For It Is All That Truth Is Known As.

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, And That Those Other Worlds Must Contain Experiences Which Have A Meaning For Our Life Also; And That Although In The Main Their Experiences And Those Of This World Keep Discrete, Yet The Two Become Continuous At Certain Points, And Higher Energies Filter In.

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

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

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

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

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

Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life. Each Lapse Is Like The Letting Fall Of A Ball Of String Which One Is Carefully Winding Up; A Single Slip Undoes More Than A Great Many Turns Will Wind Again.

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

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, Never To Be Undone.

Mental Fire Is What Won't Burn Real Sticks; Mental Water Is What Won't Necessarily (though Of Course It May) Put Out Even A Mentalfire.

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.

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

The Good Or Bad Is Not In The Circumstance, But Only In The Mind...that Encounters It.

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

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

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.

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.

So It Is With Children Who Learn To Read Fluently And Well: They Begin To Take Flight Into Whole New Worlds As Effortlessly As Young Birds Take To The Sky.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

The War For Our Union, With All The Constitutional Issues Which It Settled, And All The Military Lessons Which It Gathered In, Has Throughout Its Dilatory Length But One Meaning In The Eyes Of History. It Freed The Country From The Social Plague Which Until Then Had Made Political Development Impossible In The United States. More And More, As The Years Pass, Does The Meaning Stand Forth As The Sole Meaning.

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

Truth In Our Ideas Means Their Power To Work.

The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Spontaneous Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully, To Look Round Cheerfully, And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There. If Such Conduct Does Not Make You Soon Feel Cheerful, Nothing Else On That Occasion Can. 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.

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.

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

Truth, As Any Dictionary Will Tell You, Is A Property Of Certain Of Our Ideas. It Means Their Agreement, As Falsity Means Their Disagreement, With Reality.

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 Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All.

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.

Habit Simplifies Our Movements, Makes Them Accurate, And Diminishes Fatigue.

The Mind Is Made Up By What It Feeds Upon.

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

Men's Activities Are Occupied Into Ways -- In Grappling With External Circumstances And In Striving To Set Things At One In Their Own Topsy-turvy Mind.

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.

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

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

I Originally Studied Medicine In Order To Be A Physiologist, But I Drifted Into Psychology And Philosophy From A Sort Of Fatality. I Never Had Any Philosophic Instruction, The First Lecture On Psychology I Ever Heard Being The First I Ever Gave.

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.

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

One Hearty Laugh Together Will Bring Enemies Into A Closer Communion Of Heart Than Hours Spent On Both Sides In Inward Wrestling With The Mental Demon Of Uncharitable Feeling.

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.

When You Have To Make A Choice And Don't Make It, That Is In Itself A Choice.

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.

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

...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.

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

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

The Highest Flights Of Charity, Devotion, Trust, Patience, Bravery To Which The Wings Of Human Nature Have Spread Themselves, Have Been Flown For Religious Ideals.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

For Morality Life Is A War, And The Service Of The Highest Is A Sort Of Cosmic Patriotism Which Also Calls For Volunteers.

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

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.

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.

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

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

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

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.

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.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity Successful Men Act As Though They Have Accomplished Or Are Enjoying Something. Soon It Becomes A Reality. Act, Look, Feel Successful, Conduct Yourself Accordingly, And You Will Be Amazed At The Positive Results.

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

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitement's Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

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

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

Changing Your Life

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

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

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

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.

As The Art Of Reading (after A Certain Stage In One's Education) Isthe Art Of Skipping, So The Art Of Being Wise Is The Art Of Knowing What To Overlook.

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.

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

To Be Conscious Means Not Simply To Be, But To Be Reported, Known, To Have Awareness Of One's Being Added To That Being.

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.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

Sobriety Diminishes, Discriminates, And Says No; Drunkenness Expands, Unites, And Says Yes. Not Through Mere Perversity Do Men Run After It.

What Every Genuine Philosopher (every Genuine Man, In Fact) Craves Most Is Praise Although The Philosophers Generally Call It Recognition!

Rewards And Recognition

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

As Charles Lamb Says, There Is Nothing So Nice As Doing Good By Stealth And Being Found Out By Accident, So I Now Say It Is Even Nicer To Make Heroic Decisions And To Be Prevented By 'circumstances Beyond Your Control' From Ever Trying To Execute Them.

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

The Pragmatist Turns Away From Abstraction And Insufficiency, From Verbal Solutions, From Bad A Priori Reasons, From Fixed Principles, Closed Systems, And Pretended Absolutes And Origins. He Turns Toward Concreteness And Adequacy, Towards Facts, Towards Action, And Towards Power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Real Culture Lives By Sympathies And Admirations, Not By Dislikes And Disdains; Under All Misleading Wrappings It Pounces Unerringly Upon The Human Core.

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

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

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Just For Today I Will Exercise My Soul In Three Ways: I Will Do Somebody A Good Turn And Not Get Found Out. I Will Do At Least Two Things I Don't Want To Do

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

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'.

Plasticity, Then, In The Wide Sense Of The Word, Means The Possession Of A Structure Weak Enough To Yield To An Influence, But Strong Enough Not To Yield All At Once. Each Relatively Stable Phase Of Equilibrium In Such A Structure Is Marked By What We May Call A New Set Of Habits.

So Far War Has Been The Only Force That Can Discipline A Whole Community, And Until An Equivalent Discipline Is Organized, I Believe That War Must Have Its Way.

New Habits Can Be Launched.

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

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.

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.

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

The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Spontaneous Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully, To Look Round Cheerfully, And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There. If Such Conduct Does Not Make You Soon Feel Cheerful, Nothing Else On That Occasion Can.

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

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

We Are Doomed To Cling To A Life Even While We Find It Unendurable.

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

Genius... Means Little More Than The Faculty Of Perceiving In An Unhabitual Way.

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

General Scepticism Is The Live Mental Attitude Of Refusing To Conclude. It Is A Permanent Torpor Of The Will, Renewing Itself In Detail Towards Each Successive Thesis That Offers, And You Can No More Kill It Off By Logic Than You Can Kill Off Obstinacy Or Practical Joking.

... 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.

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

The Exercise Of Voluntary Attention In The Schoolroom Must Therefore Be Counted One Of The Most Important Points Of Training That Take Place There; And The First-rate Teacher, By The Keenness Of The Remoter Interests Which He Is Able To Awaken, Will Provide Abundant Opportunities For Its Occurrence.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Prescription Is That The Subject Must Be Made To Show New Aspects Of Itself; To Prompt New Questions; In A Word, To Change. From An Unchanging Subject The Attention Inevitably Wanders Away.

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.

Do Every Day Or Two Something For No Other Reason Than Its Difficulty.

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

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

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

Our Faith Is Faith In Someone Else's Faith, And In The Greatest Matters This Is Most The Case.

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

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

If The Topic Be Highly Abstract, Show Its Nature By Concrete Examples. If It Be Unfamiliar, Trace Some Point Of Analogy In It With The Known. If It Be Inhuman, Make It Figure As Part Of A Story. If It Be Difficult, Couple Its Acquisition With Some Prospect Of Personal Gain. Above All Things, Make Sure That It Shall Run Through Certain Inner Changes, Since No Unvarying Object Can Possibly Hold The Mental Field For Long.

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.

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

Procrastination

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

Let Everything You Do Be Done As If It Makes A Difference.

Making A Difference

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

Making A Difference

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

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

Habit Is The Great Flywheel Of Society.

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.

History Is A Bath Of Blood.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

When A Thing Is New, People Say: ‘it Is Not True.’ Later, When Its Truth Becomes Obvious, They Say: ‘it Is Not Important.’ Finally, When Its Importance Cannot Be Denied, They Say: ‘anyway, It Is Not New.

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

In The Acquisition Of A New Habit, Or The Leaving Off Of An Old One, We Must Take Care To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided An Initiative As Possible.

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.

There Is A Voice Inside Which Speaks And Says, "this Is The Real Me!"

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

If It Works, It's True.

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.

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William E. Gladstone

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