William James Quotes
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The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
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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.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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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.
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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.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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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.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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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.
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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.
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Truth happens to an idea
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The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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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.
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.