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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.

-William James

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We, The Lineal Representatives

William James

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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.

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In Modern Eyes, Precious Though Wars May Be They Must Not Be Waged Solely For The Sake Of The Ideal Harvest. Only When Forced Upon One, Is A War Now Thought Permissible.

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

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.

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

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

There Can Be No Final Truth In Ethics Any More Than In Physics, Until The Last Man Has Had His Experience And Said His Say.

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

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.

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

If Things Are Ever To Move Upward, Some One Must Take The First Step, And Assume The Risk Of It. No One Who Is Not Willing To Try Charity, To Try Non-resistance As The Saint Is Always Willing, Can Tell Whether These Methods Will Or Will Not Succeed.

A Thing Is Important If Anyone Think It Important.

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

Of All The Beautiful Truths Pertaining To The Soul None Is More Gladdening Or Fruitful Than To Know You Can Regenerate And Make Yourself What You Will.

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.

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

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

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.

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.

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

The Study A Posteriori Of The Distribution Of Consciousness Shows It To Be Exactly Such As We Might Expect In An Organ Added For The Sake Of Steering A Nervous System Grown Too Complex To Regulate Itself.

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

It Is Not Probable That The Reader Will Be Satisfied With Any Of These Solutions, And Contemporary Philosophers, Even Rationalistically Minded Ones, Have On The Whole Agreed That No One Has Intelligibly Banished The Mystery Of Fact.

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

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!.

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

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

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.

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?

Take The Happiest Man, The One Most Envied By The World, And In Nine Cases Out Of Ten His Inmost Consciousness Is One Of Failure. Either His Ideals In The Line Of His Achievements Are Pitched Far Higher Than The Achievements Themselves, Or Else He Has Secret Ideals Of Which The World Knows Nothing, And In Regard To Which He Inwardly Knows Himself To Be Found Wanting.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness.

It Is Well For The World That In Most Of Us, By The Age Of Thirty, The Character Has Set Like Plaster, And Will Never Soften Again.

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.

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

There Is But One Indefectibly Certain Truth , And That Is The Truth That Pyrrhonistic Scepticism Itself Leaves Standing, The Truth That The Present Phenomenon Of Consciousness Exists.

This Overcoming Of All The Usual Barriers Between The Individual And The Absolute Is The Great Mystic Achievement. In Mystic States We Both Become One With The Absolute And We Become Aware Of Our Oneness. This Is The Everlasting And Triumphant Mystical Tradition, Hardly Altered By Differences Of Clime Or Creed.

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

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

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

Emotional Occasions, Especially Violent Ones, Are Extremely Potent In Precipitating Mental Rearrangements. The Sudden And Explosive Ways In Which Love, Jealousy, Guilt, Fear, Remorse, Or Anger Can Seize Upon One Are Known To Everybody. . . . And Emotions That Come In This Explosive Way Seldom Leave Things As They Found Them.

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

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.

To Spend Life For Something Which Outlasts It.

I Am Tired Of The Position Of The Dried-up Critic And Doubter. The Believer Is The True Full Man. (from A Biography Of James By Robert D. Richardson)

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.

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.

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

Every Individual Existence Goes Out In A Lonely Spasm Of Helpless Agony.

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

All Religions Begin With The Cry Help.

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

...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.

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

Procrastination

Failure, Then, Failure! So The World Stamps Us At Every Turn. We Strew It With Our Blunders, Our Misdeeds, Our Lost Opportunities, With All The Memorials Of Our Inadequacy To Our Vocation. And With What A Damning Emphasis Does It Then Blot Us Out! No Easy Fine, No Mere Apology Or Formal Expiation, Will Satisfy The World's Demands, But Every Pound Of Flesh Exacted Is Soaked With All Its Blood. The Subtlest Forms Of Suffering Known To Man Are Connected With The Poisonous Humiliations Incidental To These Results.

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

Rewards And Recognition

The Community Stagnates Without The Impulse Of The Individual. The Impulse Dies Away Without The Sympathy Of The Community.

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.

New Habits Can Be Launched.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

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

... Religious Experience, As We Have Studied It, Cannot Be Cited As Unequivocally Supporting The Infinitist Belief. The Only Thingthat It Unequivocally Testifies To Is That We Can Experience Union With Something Larger Than Ourselves And In That Union Find Our Greatest Peace.

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

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

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.

Between What A Man Calls Me And What He Simply Calls Mine The Line Is Difficult To Draw. We Feel And Act About Certain Things That Are Ours Very Much As We Feel And Act About Ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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.

Truths Emerge From Facts, But They Dip Forward Into Facts Again And Add To Them; Which Facts Again Create Or Reveal New Truth (the Word Is Indifferent) And So On Indefinitely. The 'facts' Themselves Meanwhile Are Not True. They Simply Are. Truth Is The Function Of The Beliefs That Start And Terminate Among Them.

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

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

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

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

To Neglect The Wise Sayings Of Great Thinkers Is To Deny Ourselves The Truest Education.

Philosophy, Beginning In Wonder, As Plato And Aristotle Said, Is Able To Fancy Everything Different From What It Is. It Sees The Familiar As If It Were Strange, And The Strange As If It Were Familiar. It Can Take Things Up And Lay Them Down Again. It Rouses Us From Our Native Dogmatic Slumber And Breaks Up Our Caked Prejudices.

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

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.

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

If There Is Aught Of Good In The Style, It Is The Result Of Ceaseless Toil In Rewriting. Everything Comes Out Wrong With Me At First; But When Once Objectified In A Crude Shape, I Can Torture And Poke And Scrape And Pat It Till It Offends Me No More.

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.

The Most Peculiar Social Self Which One Is Apt To Have Is In The Mind Of The Person One Is In Love With.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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.

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.

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

Mankind's Common Instinct For Reality Has Always Held The World To Be Essentially A Theatre For Heroism.

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

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!

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?

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.

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

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

The Total Mental Efficiency Of A Man Is The Resultant Of The Working Together Of All His Faculties. He Is Too Complex A Being For Any One Of Them To Have The Casting Vote. If Any One Of Them Do Have The Casting Vote, It Is More Likely To Be The Strength Of His Desire And Passion, The Strength Of The Interest He Takes In What Is Proposed. Concentration, Memory, Reasoning Power, Inventiveness, Excellence Of The Senses, All Are Subsidiary To This.

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

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.

When Happiness Is Actually In Possession, The Thought Of Evil Can No More Acquire The Feeling Of Reality Than The Thought Of Good Can Gain Reality When Melancholy Rules. To The Man Actively Happy, From Whatever Cause, Evil Simply Cannot Then And There Be Believed In.

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

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

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

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

In The Deepest Heart Of All Of Us There Is A Corner In Which The Ultimate Mystery Of Things Works Sadly.

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

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

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.

Democracy Is Still Upon Its Trial. The Civic Genius Of Our People Is Its Only Bulwark.

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

If Theological Ideas Prove To Have A Value For Concrete Life, They Will Be True, For Pragmatism, In The Sense Of Being Good For So Much. How Much More They Are True, Will Depend Entirely On Their Relations To The Other Truths That Also Have To Be Acknowledged.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

Better Risk Loss Of Truth Than Chance Of Error--that Is Your Faith-vetoer's Exact Position. He Is Actively Playing His Stake As Much As The Believer Is; He Is Backing The Field Against The Religious Hypothesis, Just As The Believer Is Backing The Religious Hypothesis Against The Field.

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

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

Faith Branches Off The Highroad Before Reason Begins

In Any Project The Important Factor Is Your Belief. Without Belief, There Can Be No Successful Outcome.

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.

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

Inspirational Sports

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.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

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.

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

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.

The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race.

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.

Whilst Part Of What We Perceive Comes Through Our Senses From The Object Before Us, Another Part (and It May Be The Larger Part) Always Comes Out Of Our Own Mind.

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

Time Itself Comes In Drops.

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...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.

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.

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.

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

Feed The Growing Human Being, Feed Him With The Sort Of Experience For Which From Year To Year He Shows A Natural Craving, And He Will Develop In Adult Life A Sounder Sort Of Mental Tissue, Even Though He May Seem To Be 'wasting' A Great Deal Of His Growing Time, In The Eyes Of Those For Whom The Only Channels Of Learning Are Books And Verbally Communicated Information.

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.

Regarding Mutual Tolerance: It Is Negative In One Sense, But Positive In Another. It Absolutely Forbids Us To Be Forward In Pronouncing On The Meaninglessness Of Forms Of Existence Other Than Our Own; And It Commands Us To Tolerate, Respect, And Indulge Those Whom We See Harmlessly Interested And Happy In Their Own Ways, However Unintelligible These May Be To Us. Hands Off.

Agisci Come Se Quel Che Fai, Facesse La Differenza. La Fa!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Perfect Stillness Of The Night Was Thrilled By A More Solemn Silence. The Darkness Held A Presence That Was All The More Felt Because It Was Not Seen. I Could Not Any More Have Doubted That He Was There Than That I Was. Indeed, I Felt Myself To Be, If Possible, The Less Real Of The Two.

For I Had Often Said That The Best Argument I Knew For An Immortal Life Was The Existence Of A Man Who Deserved One As Well As Child Did.

...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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When A Superior Intellect And A Psychopathic Temperament Coalesce In The Same Individual, We Have The Best Possible Condition For The Kind Of Effective Genius That Gets Into The Biographical Dictionaries.

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.

So You See That The Process Of Education, Taken In A Large Way, May Be Described As Nothing But The Process Of Acquiring Ideas Or Conceptions, The Best Educated Mind Being The Mind Which Has The Largest Stock Of Them, Ready To Meet The Largest Possible Variety Of The Emergencies Of Life. The Lack Of Education Means Only The Failure To Have Acquired Them, And The Consequent Liability To Be 'floored' And 'rattled' In The Vicissitudes Of Experience.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It Is Only The Fundamental Conceptions Of Psychology Which Are Of Real Value To A Teacher.

Man's Chief Difference From The Brutes Lies In The Exuberant Excess Of His Subjective Propensities. Prune His Extravagance, Sober Him, And You Undo Him.

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

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

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

The Deepest Hunger In Human Beings Is The Desire To Be Appreciated.

Our Ideas Must Agree With Realities, Be Such Realities Concrete Or Abstract, Be They Facts Or Be They Principles, Under Penalty Of Endless Inconsistency And Frustration.

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.

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.

In All This Process Of Acquiring Conceptions, A Certain Instinctive Order Is Followed. There Is A Native Tendency To Assimilate Certain Kinds Of Conception At One Age, And Other Kinds Of Conception At A Later Age.

As The Brain-changes Are Continuous, So Do All These Consciousnesses Melt Into Each Other Like Dissolving Views. Properly They Are But One Protracted Consciousness, One Unbroken Stream.

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

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.

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

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.

The Trail Of The Human Serpent Is Thus Over Everything.

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

To Know An Object Is To Lead To It Through A Context Which The World Provides

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

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

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

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

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

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

Few People Have Definitely Articulated Philosophies Of Their Own. But Almost Everyone Has His Own Peculiar Sense Of A Certain Total Character In The Universe, And Of The Inadequacy Of Fully To Match It [to] The Peculiar Systems That He Knows.

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

Many Persons Nowadays Seem To Think That Any Conclusion Must Be Very Scientific If The Arguments In Favor Of It Are Derived From Twitching Of Frogs' Legs (especially If The Frogs Are Decapitated) And That, On The Other Hand, Any Doctrine Chiefly Vouched For By The Feelings Of Human Beings (with Heads On Their Shoulders) Must Be Benighted And Superstitious.

The Greatest Discovery Of My Generation Is That A Human Being Can Alter His Life By Altering His Attitudes.

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

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.

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