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

-William James

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You Make A Great,

William James

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

My Thinking Is First And Last And Always For The Sake Of My Doing, And I Can Only Do One Thing At A Time.

If We Claim Only Reasonable Probability, It Will Be As Much As Men Who Love The Truth Can Ever At Any Given Moment Hope To Have Within Their Grasp.

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

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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

Millions Of Items In The Outward Order Are Present To My Senses Which Never Properly Enter Into My Experience. Why? Because They Have No Interest For Me. My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To. Only Those Items Which I Notice Shape My Mind --without Selective Interest, Experience Is An Utter Chaos.

Man, Whatever Else He May Be, Is Primarily A Practical Being, Whose Mind Is Given Him To Aid In Adapting Him To This World's Life

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Life Is One Long Struggle Between Conclusions Based On Abstract Ways Of Conceiving Cases, And Opposite Conclusions Prompted By Our Instinctive Perception Of Them.

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

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

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

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity.

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

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

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.

To Change Ones Life: Start Immediately. Do It Flamboyantly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The True'to Put It Very Briefly, Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Thinking, Just As 'the Right' Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Behaving.

Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism, For Instance, Also Seems To Let God Evaporate Into Abstract Ideality. Not A Deity In Concreto, Not A Superhuman Person, But The Immanent Divinity In Things, The Essentially Spiritual Structure Of The Universe, Is The Object Of The Transcendentalist Cult. In That Address Of The Graduating Class At Divinity College In 1838 Which Made Emerson Famous, The Frank Expression Of This Worship Of Mere Abstract Laws Was What Made The Scandal Of The Performance.

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.

[t]here Is Very Little Difference Between One Person And Another, But What Little Difference Ther Eis, Is Very Important.

From All These Facts There Emerges A Very Simple Abstract Program For The Teacher To Follow In Keeping The Attention Of The Child: Begin With The Line Of His Native Interests, And Offer Him Objects That Have Some Immediate Connection With These.

The Unrest Which Keeps The Never Stopping Clock Of Metaphysics Going Is The Thought That The Nonexistence Of This World Is Just As Possible As Its Existence.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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.

To Give Up Pretensions Is As Blessed A Relief As To Get Them Ratified.

I Myself Believe That The Evidence For God Lies Primarily In Inner Personal Experiences.

The Simplest Rudiment Of Mystical Experience Would Seem To Be That Deepened Sense Of The Significance Of A Maxim Or Formula Which Occasionally Sweeps Over One.

Mystical Experiences

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

Modern War Is So Expensive That We Feel Trade To Be A Better Avenue To Plunder; But Modern Man Inherits All The Innate Pugnacity And All The Love Of Glory Of His Ancestors.

The Squalid Cash Interpretation Put On The Word Success Is Our National Disease.

If You Only Care Enough For A Result, You Will Almost Certainly Attain It. Only You Must, Then, Really Wish These Things, And Wish Them Exclusively, And Not Wish At The Same Time A Hundred Other Incompatible Things Just As Strongly.

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

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.

As We Take, In Fact, A General View Of The Wonderful Stream Of Our Consciousness, What Strikes Us First Is This Different Pace Of Its Parts. Like A Bird 's Life, It Seems To Be Made Of An Alternation Of Flights And Perchings.

My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To.

I Don't Sing Because I'm Happy; I'm Happy Because I Sing.

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.

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

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.

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.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

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.

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

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.

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

An Enormous Mass Of Experience, Both Of Homeopathic Doctors And Their Patients, Is Invoked In Favor Of The Efficacy Of These Remedies And Doses.

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

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.

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

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.

But Petitional Prayer Is Only One Department Of Prayer; And If We Take The Word In The Wider Sense As Meaning Every Kind Of Inward Communion Or Conversation With The Power Recognized As Divine, We Can Easily See That Scientific Criticism Leaves It Untouched. Prayer In This Wide Sense Is The Very Soul And Essence Of Religion.

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.

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

What Interest, Zest, Or Excitement Can There Be In Achieving The Right Way, Unless We Are Enabled To Feel That The Wrong Way Is Also A Possible And A Natural Way, Nay, More, A Menacing And An Imminent Way? And What Sense Can There Be In Condemning Ourselves For Taking The Wrong Way, Unless We Need Have Done Nothing Of The Sort, Unless The Right Way Was Open To Us As Well? I Cannot Understand The Willingness To Act, No Matter How We Feel, Without The Belief That Acts Are Really Good And Bad.

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

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

From A Pragmatic Point Of View, The Difference Between Living Against A Background Of Foreigness (an Indifferent Universe) And One Of Intimacy (a Benevolent Universe) Means The Difference Between A General Habit Of Wariness And One Of Trust.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

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

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

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

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.

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge. There Is No More Contemptible Type Of Human Character Than That Of The Nerveless Sentimentalist And Dreamer, Who Spends His Life In A Weltering Sea Of Sensibility And Emotion, But Who Never Does A Manly Concrete Deed.

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

All Our Life, So Far As It Has Definite Form, Is But A Mass Of Habits.

The Greatest Discovery Of The 20th Century Is That Our Attitude Of Mind Determines Our Quality Of Life, Not Circumstances.

To Kill Time Is Not Murder, It's Suicide.

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.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

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.

Conversion Is In Its Essence A Normal Adolescent Phenomenon, Incidental To The Passage From The Child's Small Universe To The Wider Intellectual And Spiritual Life Of Maturity.

... 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.

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

An Idea Will Infect Another With Its Own Emotional Interest When They Have Become Both Associated Together Into Any Sort Of A Mental Total.

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

Inspirational Sports

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

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness, And Their Companionship In The Saintly Life Need In No Way Occasion Surprise.

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

Changing Your Life

We May Be In The Universe As Dogs And Cats Are In Our Libraries, Seeing The Books And Hearing The Conversation, But Having No Inkling Of The Meaning Of It All.

I Am Done With Great Things And Big Things, Great Institutions And Big Success, And I Am For Those Tiny, Invisible Molecular Moral Forces That Work From Individual To Individual, Creeping Through The Crannies Of The World Like So Many Rootlets, Or Like The Capillary Oozing Of Water, Yet Which If You Give Them Time, Will Rend The Hardest Monuments Of Man's Pride.

We Have Lost The Power Even Of Imagining What The Ancient Idealization Of Poverty Could Have Meant: The Liberation From Material Attachments, The Unbribed Soul, The Manlier Indifference, The Paying Our Way By What We Are And Not By What We Have, The Right To Fling Away Our Life At Any Moment Irresponsibly - The More Athletic Trim, In Short, The Moral Fighting Shape.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The Teacher's Prime Concern Should Be To Ingrain Into The Pupil That Assortment Of Habits That Shall Be Most Useful To Him Throughout Life. Education Is For Behavior, And Habits Are The Stuff Of Which Behavior Consists.

There's Nothing So Absurd That If You Repeat It Often Enough, People Will Believe It.

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.

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

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

New Experiences

If 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.

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

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

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

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

I Believe There Is No Source Of Deception In The Investigation Of Nature Which Can Compare With A Fixed Belief That Certain Kinds Of Phenomena Are Impossible.

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

Pretend What We May, The Whole Man Within Us Is At Work When We Form Our Philosophical Opinions.

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

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision.

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

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.

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.

Out Of Time We Cut 'days' And 'nights', 'summers' And 'winters.' We Say What, Each Part Of The Sensible Continuum Is, And All These Abstract Whats Are Concepts. The Intelletual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of A Conceptual Order For The Persceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

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.

Where Quality Is The Thing Sought After, The Thing Of Supreme Quality Is Cheap, Whatever The Price One Has To Pay For It.

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.

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision, And For Whom The Lighting Of Every Cigar, The Drinking Of Every Cup, The Time Of Rising And Going To Bed Every Day, And The Beginning Of Every Bit Of Work, Are Subjects Of Express Volitional Deliberation.

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.

All The Higher, More Penetrating Ideals Are Revolutionary. They Present Themselves Far Less In The Guise Of Effects Of Past Experience Than In That Of Probable Causes Of Future Experience, Factors To Which The Environment And The Lessons It Has So Far Taught Us Must Learn To Bend.

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.

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Even If Matter Could Do Every Outward Thing That God Does, The Idea Of It Would Not Work As Satisfactorily, Because The Chief Callfor A God On Modern Men's Part Is For A Being Who Will Inwardly Recognize Them And Judge Them Sympathetically. Matter Disappoints This Craving Of Our Ego, So God Remains For Most Men The Truer Hypothesis, And Indeed Remains So For Definite Pragmatic Reasons.

Selection Is The Very Keel On Which Our Mental Ship Is Built. And In This Case Of Memory Its Utility Is Obvious. If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

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

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

We Hear The Words We Have Spoken, Feel Our Own Blow As We Give It, Or Read In The Bystander's Eyes The Success Or Failure Of Our Conduct.

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.

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.

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

The Mind Is Made Up By What It Feeds Upon.

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

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.

It Does Not Follow, Because Our Ancestors Made So Many Errors Of Fact And Mixed Them With Their Religion, That We Should Therefore Leave Off Being Religious At All. By Being Religious We Establish Ourselves In Possession Of Ultimate Reality At The Only Points At Which Reality Is Given Us To Guard. Our Responsible Concern Is With Our Private Destiny, After All.

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

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

Making A Difference

The Man Whose Acquisitions Stick Is The Man Who Is Always Achieving And Advancing Whilst His Neighbors, Spending Most Of Their Time In Relearning What They Once Knew But Have Forgotten, Simply Hold Their Own.

Give Up The Feeling Of Responsibility, Let Go Your Hold, Resign The Care Of Your Destiny To Higher Powers, Be Genuinely Indifferent As To What Becomes Of It All And You Will Find Not Only That You Gain A Perfect Inward Relief, But Often Also, In Addition, The Particular Goods You Sincerely Thought You Were Renouncing.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness.

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Theoretically Possible.

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

...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.

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

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

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.

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works So As Positively To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge.

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.

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.

A Remarkable Parallel, Which I Think Has Never Been Noticed, Obtains Between The Facts Of Social Evolution On The One Hand, And Of Zological Evolution As Expounded By Mr. Darwin On The Other.

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

True Ideas Lead Us Into Useful Verbal And Conceptual Quarters As Well As Directly Up To Useful Sensible Termini. They Lead To Consistency, Stability And Flowing Human Intercourse.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

[pragmatism's] Only Test Of Probable Truth Is What Works Best In The Way Of Leading Us, What Fits Every Part Of Life Best And Combines With The Collectivity Of Experience's Demands, Nothing Being Omitted.

The Prevalent Fear Of Poverty Among The Educated Classes Is The Worst Moral Disease From Which Our Civilization Suffers.

A Beethoven String-quartet Is Truly, As Some One Has Said, A Scraping Of Horses' Tails On Cats' Bowels, And May Be Exhaustively Described In Such Terms; But The Application Of This Description In No Way Precludes The Simultaneous Applicability Of An Entirely Different Description.

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.

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

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

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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