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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.

-William James

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Whilst Part Of What

William James

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

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

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 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.

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

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

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.

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

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 Soul Is Stronger Than Its Surroundings.

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

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?

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.

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

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

It Is Our Attitude At The Beginning Of A Difficult Task Which, More Than Anything Else, Will Affect Its Successful Outcome.

The Work That Leads To A Doctor's Degree Is A Constant Temptation To Sacrifice One's Growth As A Man To One's Growth As A Specialist.

Since Belief Is Measured By Action, He Who Forbids Us To Believe Religion To Be True, Necessarily Also Forbids Us To Act As We Should If We Did Believe It To Be True.

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

Tell Him To Live By Yes And No - Yes To Everything Good, No To Everything Bad.

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.

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)

The History Of Philosophy Is To A Great Extent That Of A Certain Clash Of Human Temperaments.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

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

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

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

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.

Humanism . . . Is Not A Single Hypothesis Or Theorem, And It Dwells On No New Facts. It Is Rather A Slow Shifting In The Philosophic Perspective, Making Things Appear As From A New Centre Of Interest Or Point Of Sight.

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

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

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.

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

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

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

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

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

We Are Proud Of A Human Nature That Could Be So Passionately Extreme, But We Shrink From Advising Others To Follow The Example.

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

Procrastination

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!

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

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

In My Individual Heart I Fully Believe My Faith Is As Robust As Yours. The Trouble With Your Robust And Full Bodied Faiths, However, Is, That They Begin To Cut Each Others Throats Too Soon, And For Getting On In The World And Establishing A Modus Vivendi These Pestilential Refinements And Reasonablenesses And Moderations Have To Creep In.

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

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.

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

Changing Your Life

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.

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

We Ought, All Of Us, To Realize Each Other In This Intense, Pathetic, And Important Way. If You Say That This Is Absurd, And That We Cannot Be In Love With Everyone At Once, I Merely Point Out To You That, As A Matter Of Fact, Certain Persons Do Exist With An Enormous Capacity For Friendship And For Taking Delight In Other People's Lives; And That Such Persons Know More Of Truth Than If Their Hearts Were Not So Big.

The Attitude Of Unhappiness Is Not Only Painful, It Is Mean And Ugly. What Can Be More Base And Unworthy Than The Pining, Puling, Mumping Mood, No Matter By What Outward Ills It May Have Been Engendered? What Is More Injurious To Others? What Less Helpful As A Way Out Of The Difficulty? It But Fastens And Perpetuates The Trouble Which Occasioned It, And Increases The Total Evil Of The Situation. At All Costs, Then, We Ought To Reduce The Sway Of That Mood; We Ought To Scout It In Ourselves And Others, And Never Show It Tolerance.

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.

Man Can Alter His Life By Altering His Thinking.

... If We Take The Universe Of 'fitting,' Countless Coats 'fit' Backs, And Countless Boots 'fit' Feet, On Which They Are Not Practically Fitted; Countless Stones 'fit' Gaps In Walls Into Which No One Seeks To Fit Them Actually. In The Same Way Countless Opinions 'fit' Realities, And Countless Truths Are Valid, Tho No Thinker Ever Thinks Them.

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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.

True Is The Name For Whatever Idea Starts The Verification Process, Useful Is The Name For Its Completed Function In Experience

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.

For The Moment, What We Attend To Is Reality.

The Gist Of The Matter Is This: Every Impression That Comes In From Without, Be It A Sentence Which We Hear, An Object Of Vision, Or An Effluvium Which Assails Our Nose, No Sooner Enters Our Consciousness Than It Is Drafted Off In Some Determinate Direction Or Other, Making Connection With The Other Materials Already There, And Finally Producing What We Call Our Reaction. The Particular Connections It Strikes Into Are Determined By Our Past Experiences And The 'associations' Of The Present Sort Of Impression With Them.

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

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

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

To Be Fertile In Hypotheses Is The First Perquisite Of Creativity And To Be Willing To Throw Them Away The Moment Experience Contradicts Them Is The Next.

How Can The Moribund Old Man Reason Back To Himself The Romance, The Mystery, The Imminence Of Great Things With Which Our Old Earth Tingled For Him In The Days When He Was Young And Well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Knows Governments Most Completely Is He Who Troubles Himself Least About A Definition Which Shall Give Their Essence. Enjoying An Intimate Acquaintance With All Their Particularities In Turn, He Would Naturally Regard An Abstract Conception In Which These Were Unified As A Thing More Misleading Than Enlightening.

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

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

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.

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

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

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being. They Make Very Small Use Of Their Possible Consciousness, And Of Their Soul's Resources In General, Much Like A Man Who, Out Of His Whole Bodily Organism, Should Get Into A Habit Of Using And Moving Only His Little Finger.

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The States Of Consciousness Are All That Psychology Needs To Do Her Work With. Metaphysics Or Theology May Prove The Soul To Exist; But For Psychology The Hypothesis Of Such A Substantial Principle Of Unity Is Superfluous.

Romeo Wants Juliet As The Filings Want The Magnet; And If No Obstacles Intervene He Moves Towards Her By As Straight A Line As They. But Romeo And Juliet, If A Wall Be Built Between Them, Do Not Remain Idiotically Pressing Their Faces Against Its Opposite Sides Like The Magnet And The Filings With The Card. Romeo Soon Finds A Circuitous Way, By Scaling The Wall Or Otherwise, Of Touching Juliet's Lips Directly. With The Filings The Path Is Fixed; Whether It Reaches The End Depends On Accidents. With The Lover It Is The End Which Is Fixed, The Path May Be Modified Indefinitely.

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

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

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

In This Real World Of Sweat And Dirt, It Seems To Me That When A View Of Things Is 'noble,' That Ought To Count As Presumption Against Its Truth, And As A Philosophic Disqualification. The Prince Of Darkness May Be A Gentleman, As We Are Told He Is, But Whatever The God Of Earth And Heaven Is, He Can Surely Be No Gentleman.

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

A Difference Which Makes No Difference Is No Difference At All.

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

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

Every Sort Of Energy And Endurance, Of Courage And Capacity For Handling Life's Evils, Is Set Free In Those Who Have Religious Faith.

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

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.

Our Normal Waking Consciousness, Rational Consciousness As We Call It, Is But One Special Type Of Consciousness, Whilst All About It, Parted From It By The Filmiest Of Screens, There Lie Potential Forms Of Consciousness Entirely Different.

... A 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.

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

Nature In Her Unfathomable Designs Had Mixed Us Of Clay And Flame, Of Brain And Mind, That The Two Things Hang Indubitably Together And Determine Each Other's Being But How Or Why, No Mortal May Ever Know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 Old Question Of Whether There Is Design Is Idle. The Real Question Is What Is The World, Whether Or Not It Have A Designer--and That Can Be Revealed Only By The Study Of All Nature's Particulars.

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.

Results Should Not Be Too Voluntarily Aimed At Or Too Busily Thought Of. They Are Sure To Float Up Of Their Own Accord From A Long Enough Daily Work At A Given Matter.

Woe To Him Whose Beliefs Play Fast And Loose With The Order Which Realities Follow In His Experience; They Will Lead Him Nowhere Or Else Make False Connections

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.

Most Men's Friendships Are Too Inarticulate.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

The Most Violent Revolutions In An Individuals Beliefs Leave Most Of His Old Order Standing. Time And Space, Cause And Effect, Nature And History, And Ones Own Biography Remain Untouched. New Truth Is Always A Go-between, A Smoother-over Of Transitions. It Marries Old Opinion To New Fact So As Ever To Show A Minimum Of Jolt, A Maximum Of Continuity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

History Is A Bath Of Blood.

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.

We With Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea, Or Like Trees In The Forest... But The Trees Also Commingle Their Roots In The Darkness Underground.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Greatest Revolution Of Our Generation Is The Discovery That Human Beings, By Changing The Inner Attitudes Of Their Minds, Can Change The Outer Aspects Of Their Lives.

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.

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.

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

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

'pure Experience' Is The Name I Gave To The Immediate Flux Of Life Which Furnishes The Material To Our Later Reflection With Its Conceptual Categories.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Do Something Everyday For No Other Reason Than You Would Rather Not Do It, So That When The Hour Of Dire Need Draws Nigh, It May Find You Not Unnerved And Untrained To Stand The Test.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Act In Earnest And You Will Become Earnest In All You Do.

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

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

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

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

The Most Immutable Barrier In Nature Is Between One Man's Thoughts And Another's.

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.

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

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

Is Life Worth Living? It All Depends On The Liver.

But When All Is Said And Done, The Fact Remains That Some Teachers Have A Naturally Inspiring Presence And Can Make Their Exercises Interesting, Whilst Others Simply Cannot. And Psychology And General Pedagogy Here Confess Their Failure, And Hand Things Over To The Deeper Spring Of Human Personality To Conduct The Task.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

How Pleasant Is The Day When We Give Up Striving To Be Young-or Slender.

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

From The Vedas We Learn A Practical Art Of Surgery, Medicine, Music, House Building Under Which Mechanized Art Is Included. They Are Encyclopedia Of Every Aspect Of Life, Culture, Religion, Science, Ethics, Law, Cosmology And Meteorology.

Culture Religion

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

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

There Is But One Cause Of Human Failure. And That Is Man's Lack Of Faith In His True Self.

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

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

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill.

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

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

If It Works, It's True.

Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal.

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.

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Robert Rauschenberg

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