TOPICS

SEE ALSO

AUTH

BOOKS

Heart_of_Matter

Infinite_Library

Process_and_Reality

The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT

1.00b_-_INTRODUCTION

1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS

1.03_-_Concerning_the_Archetypes,_with_Special_Reference_to_the_Anima_Concept

1.04_-_Descent_into_Future_Hell

1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP

1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN

1.08a_-_The_Ladder

3.05_-_The_Formula_of_I.A.O.

3.07_-_The_Formula_of_the_Holy_Grail

3-5_Full_Circle

5_-_The_Phenomenology_of_the_Spirit_in_Fairytales

Avatars_of_the_Tortoise

Book_of_Imaginary_Beings_(text)

The_Act_of_Creation_text

The_One_Who_Walks_Away

PRIMARY CLASS

author

SIMILAR TITLES

William James

TERMS STARTING WITH

William James, who first adopted this philosophical position, and so named it, described it in The Meaning of Truth (Preface, xii-xiii) as consisting "first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.


TERMS ANYWHERE

William James, who first adopted this philosophical position, and so named it, described it in The Meaning of Truth (Preface, xii-xiii) as consisting "first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.

Henri Delacroix, Etude d'Histoire et de Psychologie du Mysticisme (Paris, 1908); Baron Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion (London, 1908); Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. (London, 1911); William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902); Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London, 1909). -- R.M.J.

In the theory of value the first question concerns the meaning of value-terms and the status of goodness. As to meaning the main point is whether goodness is definable or not, and if so, how. As to status the main point is whether goodness is subjective or objective, relative or absolute. Various positions are possible. Recent emotive meaning theories e.g. that of A. J. Ayer, hold that "good" and other value-terms have only an emotive meaning, Intuitionists and non-naturalists often hold that goodness is an indefinable intrinsic (and therefore objective or absolute) property, e.g., Plato, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, J. Laird, Meinong, N. Hartman. Metaphysical and naturalistic moralists usually hold that goodness can be defined in metaphysical or in psychological terms, generally interpreting "x is good" to mean that a certain attitude is taken toward x by some mind or group of minds. For some of them value is objective or absolute in the sense of having the same locus for everyone, e.g., Aristotle in his definition of the good as that at which all things aim, (Ethics, bk. I). For others the locus of value varies from individual to individual or from group to group, i.e. different things will be good for different individuals or groups, e.g., Hobbes, Westermarck, William James, R. B. Perry.

James, William: (1842-1910) Unquestionably one of the most influential of American thinkers, William James began his career as a teacher shortly after graduation (MD, 1870) from Harvard University. He became widely known as a brilliant and original lecturer, and his already considerable reputation was greatly enhanced in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology made its appearance. Had James written no other work, his position in American philosophy and psychology would be secure; the vividness and clarity of his style no less than the keenness of his analysis roused the imagination of a public in this country which had long been apathetic to the more abstract problems of technical philosophy. Nor did James allow this rising interest to flag. Turning to religious and moral problems, and later to metaphysics, he produced a large number of writings which gave ample evidence of his amazing ability to cut through the cumbersome terminology of traditional statement and to lay bare the essential character of the matter in hand. In this sense, James was able to revivify philosophical issues long buried from any save the classical scholars. Such oversimplifications as exist, for example, in his own "pragmatism" and "radical empiricism" must be weighed against his great accomplishment in clearing such problems as that of the One and the Many from the dry rot of centuries, and in rendering such problems immediately relevant to practical and personal difficulties. -- W.S.W.

Kyoto school. An influential school of modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy that is closely associated with philosophers from Kyoto University; it combines East Asian and especially MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist thought, such as ZEN and JoDO SHINSHu, with modern Western and especially German philosophy and Christian thought. NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and NISHITANI KEIJI (1900-1991) are usually considered to be the school's three leading figures. The name "Kyoto school" was coined in 1932 by Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a student of Nishida and Tanabe, who used it pejoratively to denounce Nishida and Tanabe's "Japanese bourgeois philosophy." Starting in the late 1970s, Western scholars began to research the philosophical insights of the Kyoto school, and especially the cross-cultural influences with Western philosophy. During the 1990s, the political dimensions of the school have also begun to receive scholarly attention. ¶ Although the school's philosophical perspectives have developed through mutual criticism between its leading figures, the foundational philosophical stance of the Kyoto school is considered to be based on a shared notion of "absolute nothingness." "Absolute nothingness" was coined by Nishida Kitaro and derives from a putatively Zen and PURE LAND emphasis on the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), which Kyoto school philosophers advocated was indicative of a distinctive Eastern approach to philosophical inquiry. This Eastern emphasis on nothingness stood in contrast to the fundamental focus in Western philosophy on the ontological notion of "being." Nishida Kitaro posits absolute nothingness topologically as the "site" or "locale" (basho) of nonduality, which overcomes the polarities of subject and object, or noetic and noematic. Another major concept in Nishida's philosophy is "self-awareness" (jikaku), a state of mind that transcends the subject-object bifurcation, which was initially adopted from William James' (1842-1910) notion of "pure experience" (J. junsui keiken); this intuition reveals a limitless, absolute reality that has been described in the West as God or in the East as emptiness. Tanabe Hajime subsequently criticized Nishida's "site of absolute nothingness" for two reasons: first, it was a suprarational religious intuition that transgresses against philosophical reasoning; and second, despite its claims to the contrary, it ultimately fell into a metaphysics of being. Despite his criticism of what he considered to be Nishida's pseudoreligious speculations, however, Tanabe's Shin Buddhist inclinations later led him to focus not on Nishida's Zen Buddhist-oriented "intuition," but instead on the religious aspect of "faith" as the operative force behind other-power (TARIKI). Inspired by both Nishida and such Western thinkers as Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (with whom he studied), Nishitani Keiji developed the existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida's philosophy of absolute nothingness. Concerned with how to reach the place of absolute nothingness, given the dilemma of, on the one hand, the incessant reification and objectification by a subjective ego and, on the other hand, the nullification of reality, he argued for the necessity of overcoming "nihilism." The Kyoto school thinkers also played a central role in the development of a Japanese political ideology around the time of the Pacific War, which elevated the Japanese race mentally and spiritually above other races and justified Japanese colonial expansion. Their writings helped lay the foundation for what came to be called Nihonjinron, a nationalist discourse that advocated the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese race; at the same time, however, Nishida also resisted tendencies toward fascism and totalitarianism in Japanese politics. Since the 1990s, Kyoto school writings have come under critical scrutiny in light of their ties to Japanese exceptionalism and pre-war Japanese nationalism. These political dimensions of Kyoto school thought are now considered as important for scholarly examination as are its contributions to cross-cultural, comparative philosophy.

Perry, Ralph Barton: (1876-) Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the new realist movement His classic biography of William James won the Pulitzer Prize for 1936. During the first World War he served as a major with the War Department Committee on Education and Special Training and this service has evidenced itself in his fervent advocacy of militant democracy. Among his works are Present Philosophical Tendencies, Philosophy of the Recent Past, General Theory of Value, 1926; Thought and Character of Wm. James, 2 vols., 1935; Shall Not Pertsh From the Earth, 1941. See Neo-Realism. -- L.E.D.

Pragmatism: (Gr. pragma, things done) Owes its inception as a movement of philosophy to C. S. Peirce and William James, but approximations to it can be found in many earlier thinkers, including (according to Peirce and James) Socrates and Aristotle, Berkeley and Hume. Concerning a closer precursor, Shadworth Hodgson, James says that he "keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known as' ". Kant actually uses the word "pragmatic" to characterize "counsels of prudence" as distinct from "rules of skill" and "commands of morality" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 40). His principle of the primacy of practical reason is also an anticipation of pragmatism. It was reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which originally led Peirce to formulate the view that the muddles of metaphysics can be cleared up if one attends to the practical consequences of ideas. The pragmatic maxim was first stated by Peirce in 1878 (Popular Science Monthly) "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". A clearer formulation by the same author reads: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". This is often expressed briefly, viz.: The meaning of a proposition is its logical (or physical) consequences. The principle is not merely logical. It is also admonitory in Baconian style "Pragmatism is the principle that everv theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose onlv meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the impentive mood". (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 5.18.) Although Peirce's maxim has been an inspiration not only to later pragmatists, but to operationalists as well, Peirce felt that it might easily be misapplied, so as to eliminate important doctrines of science -- doctrines, presumably, which hive no ascertainable practical consequences.

Psychologism: (Ger. Psychologismus) The tendency of such philosophers as Hume, J. S. Mill and William James to approach philosophical problems, whether ethical, logical, aesthetic or metaphysical, from the stand-point of psychology. Psychologismus is used by Husserl and other German writers as a term of reproach which suggests the exaggeration of the psychological to the neglect of the logical and epistemological considerations. -- L.W.

Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott: (1864-1937), unwilling to accept the idealism current at Oxford in his day on grounds that it was "absolutist", sought by a metaphysical pluralism not only to account for the unity and multiplicity of things, but also to furnish the basis for evolution theory. His developed philosophical position was generally known as "personal idealism", or "humanism", though it was closely akin to the pragmatism of William James. The kinship may be seen in Schiller's thesis that a theory of knowledge cannot be formed by abstracting from man's total experience, and may be seen further in his advocacy of the "logic of discovery" over the "logic of proof." Main works: Riddles of the Sphinx, 1891; Humanism, 1903; Logic For Use, 1930. -- C.K.D.

U. Cassina, L'oeuvre philosophique de G. Peano, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 40 (1933), pp. 481-491. Peirce, Charles Sanders: American Philosopher. Born in Cambridge, Mass, on September 10th, 1839. Harvard M.A. in 1862 and Sc. B. in 1863. Except for a brief cireer as lectuier in philosophy at Harvard, 1864-65 and 1869-70 and in logic at Johns Hopkins, 1879-84, he did no formal teaching. Longest tenure was with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey for thirty years beginning in 1861. Died at Milford, Pa. in 1914 He had completed only one work, The Grand Logic, published posthumously (Coll. Papers). Edited Studies in Logic (1883). No volumes published during his lifetime but author of many lectures, essays and reviews in periodicals, particularly in the Popular Science Monthly, 1877-78, and in The Monist, 1891-93, some of which have been reprinted in Chance, Love and Logic (1923), edited by Morris R. Cohen, and. together with the best of his other work both published and unpublished, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-35), edited by Charles Hartshorne ¦ind Paul Weiss. He was most influenced by Kant, who had he thought, raised all the relevant philosophical problems but from whom he differed on almost every solution. He was excited by Darwin, whose doctrine of evolution coincided with his own thought, and disciplined by laboratory experience in the physical sciences which inspired his search for rigor and demonstration throughout his work. Felt himself deeply opposed to Descartes, whom he accused of being responsible for the modern form of the nominalistic error. Favorably inclined toward Duns Scotus, from whom he derived his realism. Philosophy is a sub-class of the science of discovery, in turn a branch of theoretical science. The function of philosophy is to expliin and hence show unity in the variety of the universe. All philosophy takes its start in logic, or the relations of signs to their objects, and phenomenology, or the brute experience of the objective actual world. The conclusions from these two studies meet in the three basic metaphysical categories: quality, reaction, and representation. Quality is firstness or spontaneity; reaction is secondness or actuality; and representation is thirdness or possibility. Realism (q.v.) is explicit in the distinction of the modes of being actuality as the field of reactions, possibility as the field of quality (or values) and representation (or relations). He was much concerned to establish the realism of scientific method: that the postulates, implications and conclusions of science are the results of inquiry yet presupposed by it. He was responsible for pragmatism as a method of philosophy that the sum of the practical consequences which result by necessity from the truth of an intellectual conception constitutes the entire meaning of that conception. Author of the ethical principle that the limited duration of all finite things logically demands the identification of one's interests with those of an unlimited community of persons and things. In his cosmology the flux of actuality left to itself develops those systematic characteristics which are usually associated with the realm of possibility. There is a logical continuity to chance events which through indefinite repetition beget order, as illustrated in the tendency of all things to acquire habits. The desire of all things to come together in this certain order renders love a kind of evolutionary force. Exerted a strong influence both on the American pragmatist, William James (1842-1910), the instrumentalist, John Dewey (1859-), as well as on the idealist, Jociah Royce (1855-1916), and many others. -- J.K.F.

Will to Believe: A phrase made famous by William James (1842-1910) in an essay by that title (1896). In general, the phrase characterizes much of James's philosophic ideas: a defence of the right and even the necessity to believe where evidence is not complete, the adventurous spirit by which men must live, the heroic character of all creative thinking, the open-mind to possibilities, the repudiation of the stubborn spirit and the will-not-to-know, the primacy of the will in successful living, the reasonableness of the whole man acting upon presented data, the active pragmatic disposition in general. This will to believe does not imply indiscriminative faith; it implies a genuine option, one which presents an issue that is lively, momentous and forced. Acts of indecision may be negative decisions. -- V.F.

KEYS (10k)

   11 William James
   2 Tom Butler-Bowdon
   1 Aleister Crowley

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1002 William James
   9 Dale Carnegie
   6 Bertrand Russell
   5 Tim Wu
   4 Tom Butler Bowdon
   4 Michael Pollan
   4 John Green
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   2 John C Maxwell
   2 Gary Keller
   2 Ernest Becker
   2 Darius Foroux

1:The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. ~ William James,

2:Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad. ~ William James,

3:An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.    ~ William James,

4:'To change one's life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions.'    ~ William James,

5:There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.    ~ William James,

6:The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.    ~ William James,

7:As soon as one's purpose is the attainment of the maximum of possible insight into the world as a whole, the metaphysical puzzles become the most urgent ones of all. ~ William James, 'Epilogue' to Psychology: The Briefer Course,

8:There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do… contradict other philosophers." ~ William James, (1842 1910), an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, Wikipedia.,

9:A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." ~ William James, (1842 - 1910) American philosopher and psychologist, first to offer a psychology course in the U.S., labeled the "Father of American psychology," Wikipedia.,

10:Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin. ~ William James, A Pluralistic Universe,

11: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. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded. How to regard them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness ~ William James,

12:reading :::    50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:    Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)    St Augustine - Confessions (400)    Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)    Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)    Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)    Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)    Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)    GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)    Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)    Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)    Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)    Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)    Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)    Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)    Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)    GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)    Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)    Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)    Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)    Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)    William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)    Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)    Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)    J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)    CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)    Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)    Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)    Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)    W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)    Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)    Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)    John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)    Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)    James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)    Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)    Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)    Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)    Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)    Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)    Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)    Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)    Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)    Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)    Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)    Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)    Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)    Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)    Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)    Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)    Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),

13:reading :::    50 Psychology Classics: List of Books Covered:    Alfred Adler - Understanding Human Nature (1927)    Gordon Allport - The Nature of Prejudice (1954)    Albert Bandura - Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997)    Gavin Becker - The Gift of Fear (1997)    Eric Berne - Games People Play (1964)    Isabel Briggs Myers - Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type (1980)    Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain (2006)    David D Burns - Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980)    Susan Cain - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (2012)    Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984)    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity (1997)    Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006)    Albert Ellis & Robert Harper - (1961) A Guide To Rational Living(1961)    Milton Erickson - My Voice Will Go With You (1982) by Sidney Rosen    Eric Erikson - Young Man Luther (1958)    Hans Eysenck - Dimensions of Personality (1947)    Viktor Frankl - The Will to Meaning (1969)    Anna Freud - The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936)    Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams (1901)    Howard Gardner - Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983)    Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling on Happiness (2006)    Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)    Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence at Work (1998)    John M Gottman - The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work (1999)    Temple Grandin - The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed (2013)    Harry Harlow - The Nature of Love (1958)    Thomas A Harris - I'm OK - You're OK (1967)    Eric Hoffer - The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)    Karen Horney - Our Inner Conflicts (1945)    William James - Principles of Psychology (1890)    Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1953)    Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)    Alfred Kinsey - Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)    RD Laing - The Divided Self (1959)    Abraham Maslow - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1970)    Stanley Milgram - Obedience To Authority (1974)    Walter Mischel - The Marshmallow Test (2014)    Leonard Mlodinow - Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012)    IP Pavlov - Conditioned Reflexes (1927)    Fritz Perls - Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951)    Jean Piaget - The Language and Thought of the Child (1966)    Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)    VS Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain (1998)    Carl Rogers - On Becoming a Person (1961)    Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970)    Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004)    Martin Seligman - Authentic Happiness (2002)    BF Skinner - Beyond Freedom & Dignity (1953)    Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen - Difficult Conversations (2000)    William Styron - Darkness Visible (1990)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics,

14:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study    Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.    The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.    Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.    Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.    Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.    Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.    The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.    The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.    Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.    The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.    The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.    The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.    Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.    The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.    The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.    The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.    The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.    The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.    Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.    The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.    The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.    Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.    The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.    The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.    The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.    The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.    Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.    Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.    Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.    Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.    The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.    The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.    The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.    The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.    The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.    The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.    Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.    Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.    Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.    The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.    The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.    Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.    Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.    Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.    First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.    Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.    The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.    The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.    The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.    ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:“Belief creates the actual fact.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

2:“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

3:“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

4:“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

5:“Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

6:“Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

7:“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

8:“Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

9:“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

10:“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

11:“A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

12:“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

13:“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

14:“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

15:“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

16:“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

17:“There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

18:“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

19:“Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

20:“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

21:“How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

22:“The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

23:“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

24:“The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

25:“To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

26:“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

27:“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

28:“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

29:“What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

30:“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

31:“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

32:“An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

33:“Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

34:“I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

35:“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

36:“To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

37:“If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

38:“In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

39:“Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

40:“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

41:“At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

42:“Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

43:“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

44:“The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

45:“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

46:“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

47:“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

48:“I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

49:“If merely &

50:“Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

51:“Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

52:“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

53:“The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

54:“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

55:“To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

56:“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

57:“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

58:“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

59:“Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of the venture.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

60:“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

61:“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

62:“Be willing to have it so; acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

63:“Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

64:“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

65:“We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

66:“When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

67:“What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

68:“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

69:“There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

70:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

71:“Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

72:“'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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

73:“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

74:“The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

75:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

76:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

77:“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

78:“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

79:“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

80:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

81:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

82:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

83:“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

84:“First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

85:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

86:“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

87:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

88:“Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

89:“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or 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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

90:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

91:“Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted themselves the official guardians of the need, with the result that some of them actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individual by their conventional sacraments.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

92:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

93:“The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

94:“I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

95:“I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came 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!"” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

96:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

97:William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove

98:“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 person who, out of his or her whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his or her little finger.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

99:“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.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

100:“Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him or her which the incitements of that day do not call forth.  Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep.  The human individual usually lives far within his or her limits. ” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

101:“Happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. 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. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Damn the Absolute! ~ William James,

2:To change one's life: ~ William James,

3:If it works, it's true. ~ William James,

4:Truth happens to an idea ~ William James,

5:There's nothing so absurd ~ William James,

6:Work usually follows will. ~ William James,

7:All of us are beggars here. ~ William James,

8:History is a bath of blood. ~ William James,

9:New habits can be launched. ~ William James,

10:Time itself comes in drops. ~ William James,

11:Effort is a measure of a Man. ~ William James,

12:The perfection of rottenness. ~ William James,

13:Choose a self and stand by it. ~ William James,

14:It's turtles all the way down. ~ William James,

15:We are mere bundles of habits. ~ William James,

16:Belief creates the actual fact. ~ William James,

17:The means have murdered the end. ~ William James,

18:The strenuous life tastes better ~ William James,

19:The strenuous life tastes better. ~ William James,

20:Every claim creates an obligation. ~ William James,

21:Individuality is founded in feeling ~ William James,

22:our experience is what we attend to ~ William James,

23:Wisdom is learning what to overlook. ~ William James,

24:Resign your destiny to higher powers. ~ William James,

25:All religions begin with the cry Help. ~ William James,

26:Instinct leads, logic does but follow. ~ William James,

27:No decision is, in itself, a decision. ~ William James,

28:You can't out-perform your self-image. ~ William James,

29:Habit is the great flywheel of society. ~ William James,

30:It is your friends who make your world. ~ William James,

31:Lay plans as if we were to be immortal. ~ William James,

32:Man lives for science as well as bread. ~ William James,

33:The sovereign cure for worry is prayer. ~ William James,

34:What holds attention determines action. ~ William James,

35:I will act as if I do make a difference. ~ William James,

36:Our beliefs are really rules for action. ~ William James,

37:Psychology is the science of mental life ~ William James,

38:To kill time is not murder, it's suicide. ~ William James,

39:Act the part and you will become the part. ~ William James,

40:In business for yourself, not by yourself. ~ William James,

41:Lets take full advantage of this discovery ~ William James,

42:None of us are ever who we were yesterday. ~ William James,

43:Touch is the alpha and omega of affection. ~ William James,

44:Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ~ William James,

45:He believes in No-God, and he worships him, ~ William James,

46:My experience is what I agree to attend to. ~ William James,

47:Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. ~ William James,

48:The mind is made up by what it feeds upon. ~ William James,

49:The soul is stronger than its surroundings. ~ William James,

50:Truth is something that happens to an idea. ~ William James,

51:Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. ~ William James,

52:Most men's friendships are too inarticulate. ~ William James,

53:Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions. ~ William James,

54:Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. ~ William James,

55:Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me. ~ William James,

56:For the moment, what we attend to is reality. ~ William James,

57:Truth in our ideas means their power to work. ~ William James,

58:A sense of humor is just common sense dancing. ~ William James,

59:I will act as if what i do makes a difference. ~ William James,

60:To spend life for something which outlasts it. ~ William James,

61:The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god. ~ William James,

62:Events are influenced by our very great desires. ~ William James,

63:Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. ~ William James,

64:Man can alter his life by altering his thinking. ~ William James,

65:Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact. ~ William James,

66:That which is most personal, is most interesting. ~ William James,

67:Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. ~ William James,

68:Act as if what you do makes a difference, it does. ~ William James,

69:A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. ~ William James,

70:As long as there are postmen, life will have zest. ~ William James,

71:A thing is important if anyone think it important. ~ William James,

72:Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver. ~ William James,

73:Man can never have enough without having too much. ~ William James,

74:so I stand here without further deprecatory words. ~ William James,

75:The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook. ~ William James,

76:The essence of genius is to know what to overlook. ~ William James,

77:Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake. ~ William James,

78:HISTORY IS A bath of blood,” wrote William James, ~ Edward O Wilson,

79:Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good. ~ William James,

80:Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins ~ William James,

81:If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. ~ William James,

82:The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, ~ Loch Kelly,

83:Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner. ~ William James,

84:Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power. ~ William James,

85:The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated. ~ William James,

86:With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved. ~ William James,

87:If you can change your mind, you can change your life. ~ William James,

88:The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind ~ William James,

89:You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren. ~ William James,

90:Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated. ~ William James,

91:The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow. ~ William James,

92:The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy. ~ William James,

93:The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. ~ William James,

94:Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. ~ William James,

95:Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up. ~ William James,

96:Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating. ~ William James,

97:Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude. ~ William James,

98:To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions. ~ William James,

99:Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do. ~ William James,

100:Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text ~ William James,

101:I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing. ~ William James,

102:I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing. ~ William James,

103:The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature. ~ William James,

104:Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world. ~ William James,

105:Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa! ~ William James,

106:In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives. ~ William James,

107:Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference. ~ William James,

108:Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come. ~ William James,

109:Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system ~ William James,

110:If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. ~ William James,

111:My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. ~ William James,

112:To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. ~ William James,

113:To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe. ~ William James,

114:We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it. ~ William James,

115:You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind. ~ William James,

116:non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; ~ William James,

117:Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working. ~ William James,

118:Psychology is the science of mental life.” William James ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,

119:Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. ~ William James,

120:The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. ~ William James,

121:Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours. ~ William James,

122:Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'. ~ William James,

123:Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly. ~ William James,

124:Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life. ~ William James,

125:A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all. ~ William James,

126:Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority. ~ William James,

127:The education of attention would be an education par excellence ~ William James,

128:There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness. ~ William James,

129:All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help! ~ William James,

130:a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries ~ William James,

131:Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear. ~ William James,

132:The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity. ~ William James,

133:We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self..." ~ William James,

134:We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone. ~ William James,

135:'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it. ~ William James,

136:Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it. ~ William James,

137:Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. ~ William James,

138:Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door. ~ William James,

139:Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity. ~ William James,

140:Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience ~ William James,

141:We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude. ~ William James,

142:We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh. ~ William James,

143:A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result. ~ William James,

144:Cara untuk menjadi bijaksana adalah tahu apa yang harus dimaafkan. ~ William James,

145:My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing. ~ William James,

146:No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. ~ William James,

147:The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. ~ William James,

148:To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt. ~ William James,

149:To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal. ~ William James,

150:We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing. ~ William James,

151:We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh. ~ William James,

152:Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise. ~ William James,

153:If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it. ~ William James,

154:Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. ~ William James,

155:The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it. ~ William James,

156:The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated. ~ William James,

157:This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it. ~ William James,

158:Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes ~ William James,

159:Vjeruj da život vrijedi živjeti, a tvoja će ti vjera to i dokazati. ~ William James,

160:We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. ~ William James,

161:What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. ~ William James,

162:I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly. ~ William James,

163:Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy. ~ William James,

164:When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will. ~ William James,

165:You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing. ~ William James,

166:All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. ~ William James,

167:If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick. ~ William James,

168:The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. ~ William James,

169:There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!" ~ William James,

170:All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits. ~ William James,

171:Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty. ~ William James,

172:If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. —William James ~ Robert J Morgan,

173:It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power. ~ William James,

174:It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. ~ William James,

175:There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it. ~ William James,

176:To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. ~ William James,

177:We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. ~ William James,

178:We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could. ~ William James,

179:Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions. ~ William James,

180:Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous. ~ William James,

181:Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. ~ William James,

182:If you can change your mind, you can change your life.” ― William James ~ Darius Foroux,

183:The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation. ~ William James,

184:The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ William James,

185:We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. ~ William James,

186:Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. ~ William James,

187:How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender. ~ William James,

188:Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. ~ William James,

189:The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. ~ William James,

190:With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. ~ William James,

191:Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. ~ William James,

192:the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease ~ William James,

193:The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths ~ William James,

194:The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds. ~ William James,

195:The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. ~ William James,

196:Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none. ~ William James,

197:If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately. ~ William James,

198:It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit. ~ William James,

199:[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things. ~ William James,

200:The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. ~ William James,

201:The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial. ~ William James,

202:The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. ~ William James,

203:To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One ~ William James,

204:A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him. ~ William James,

205:A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. ~ William James,

206:A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world. ~ William James,

207:Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract ~ William James,

208:The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” —William James ~ Gary Keller,

209:Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences ~ William James,

210:A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. ~ William James,

211:As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. ~ William James,

212:Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. ~ William James,

213:Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. ~ William James,

214:Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue. ~ William James,

215:Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness. ~ William James,

216:The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” — William James ~ Gary Keller,

217:The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave. ~ William James,

218:The great source of terror in infancy is solitude. William James (1890) ~ Robert W Firestone,

219:Man flieht nicht, weil man Angst hat, sondern man hat Angst, weil man flieht. ~ William James,

220:Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. ~ William James,

221:To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides ~ William James,

222:When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice. ~ William James,

223:Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being. ~ William James,

224:Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess. ~ William James,

225:... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp. ~ William James,

226:Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. ~ William James,

227:Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad. ~ William James,

228:The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. ~ William James,

229:There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere. ~ William James,

230:There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual. ~ William James,

231:But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine. ~ William James,

232:It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. ~ William James,

233:I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one. ~ William James,

234:Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. ~ William James,

235:Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad. ~ William James,

236:... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. ~ William James,

237:The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires. ~ William James,

238:Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ~ William James,

239:Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. ~ William James,

240:What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. ~ William James,

241:...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that. ~ William James,

242:Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. ~ William James,

243:Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. ~ William James,

244:In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering. ~ William James,

245:The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's. ~ William James,

246:To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein ~ William James,

247:Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. ~ William James,

248:The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse. ~ William James,

249:The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease. ~ William James,

250:We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep. ~ William James,

251:If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the "as if" technique. ~ William James,

252:No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends. ~ William James,

253:The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one. ~ William James,

254:The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great. ~ William James,

255:The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts. ~ William James,

256:An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true ~ William James,

257:An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation. ~ William James,

258:Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness. ~ William James,

259:In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized. ~ William James,

260:I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. ~ William James,

261:Nguyên tắc sâu sắc nhất trong bản tính con người đó là sự thèm khát được tán thưởng. ~ William James,

262:No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. ~ William James,

263:We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them. ~ William James,

264:Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him. ~ William James,

265:Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second ~ William James,

266:Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. ~ William James,

267:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. ~ William James,

268:There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it. ~ William James,

269:'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth ~ William James,

270:Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark. ~ William James,

271:Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second. ~ William James,

272:Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed. ~ William James,

273:The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else. ~ William James,

274:The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it. ~ William James,

275:Toda nuestra vida en cuanto a su forma definida , no es más que un conjunto de hábitos ~ William James,

276:William James said, “The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it. ~ Rick Warren,

277:An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.    ~ William James,

278:Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease. ~ William James,

279:Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world. ~ William James,

280:... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences. ~ William James,

281:Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. ~ William James,

282:Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice. ~ William James,

283:Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse ~ William James,

284:Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. ~ William James,

285:I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. ~ William James,

286:Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. ~ William James,

287:There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. ~ William James,

288:To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher. ~ William James,

289:To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education. ~ William James,

290:Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. ~ William James,

291:Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. ~ William James,

292:'To change one's life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions.'    ~ William James,

293:William James said, ‘We don’t laugh because we are happy. We are happy because we laugh. ~ Robin S Sharma,

294:Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you. ~ William James,

295:In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. ~ William James,

296:It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher. ~ William James,

297:My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind. ~ William James,

298:Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not. ~ William James,

299:So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. ~ William James,

300:There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. ~ William James,

301:The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old. ~ William James,

302:There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. ~ William James,

303:To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking. ~ William James,

304:To change one’s life, start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions. — WILLIAM JAMES ~ Tammy Strobel,

305:If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door. ~ William James,

306:Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought. ~ William James,

307:Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness. ~ William James,

308:He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed. ~ William James,

309:Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university. ~ William James,

310:Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one ~ William James,

311:Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive. ~ William James,

312:The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. ~ William James,

313:There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.    ~ William James,

314:When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. ~ William James,

315:William James said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ John C Maxwell,

316:A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James,

317:At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. ~ William James,

318:Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. ~ William James,

319:Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. ~ William James,

320:Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. ~ William James,

321:Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes. ~ William James,

322:Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries? ~ William James,

323:An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. ~ William James,

324:We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. ~ William James,

325:we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood ~ William James,

326:Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. ~ William James,

327:The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. ~ William James,

328:Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality. ~ William James,

329:To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions. ~ William James,

330:We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. ~ William James,

331:If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ~ William James,

332:It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. ~ William James,

333:The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely. ~ William James,

334:Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow. ~ William James,

335:The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. —WILLIAM JAMES (1842–1910) ~ Thupten Jinpa,

336:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." William James ~ Joanna Penn,

337:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES ~ John Green,

338:What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand." ~ William James,

339:You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about. ~ William James,

340:Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. ~ William James,

341:Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. ~ William James,

342:Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. ~ William James,

343:He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. ~ William James,

344:Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves. ~ William James,

345:Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task ~ William James,

346:Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. ~ William James,

347:The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time ~ William James,

348:O God! What a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning ~ William James,

349:The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude. ~ William James,

350:The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. ~ William James,

351:To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind. ~ William James,

352:We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness. ~ William James,

353:A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates. ~ William James,

354:As William James pointed out, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ Keith Ferrazzi,

355:In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome. ~ William James,

356:Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge. ~ William James,

357:Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. ~ William James,

358:The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other. ~ William James,

359:We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. ~ William James,

360:In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly. ~ William James,

361:It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it. ~ William James,

362:Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. ~ William James,

363:Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude. ~ William James,

364:The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. ~ William James,

365:The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. ~ William James,

366:All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it. ~ William James,

367:A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed. ~ William James,

368:My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time. ~ William James,

369:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. —WILLIAM JAMES ~ Arianna Huffington,

370:We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer. ~ William James,

371:Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. ~ William James,

372:I don't know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. ~ John Green,

373:It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process. ~ William James,

374:I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ. ~ William James,

375:The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes. ~ William James,

376:We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. ~ William James,

377:Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. ~ William James,

378:The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action. ~ William James,

379:The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old. — WILLIAM JAMES ~ Michael J Gelb,

380:The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.    ~ William James,

381:Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. ~ William James,

382:There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. ~ William James,

383:There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. ~ William James,

384:William James himself once said: “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it. ~ Darius Foroux,

385:You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. ~ William James,

386:I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, ~ William James,

387:Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head. ~ William James,

388:Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny. ~ William James,

389:The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives. ~ William James,

390:It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association ~ William James,

391:The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. ~ William James,

392:To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life. ~ William James,

393:Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. ~ William James,

394:The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. ~ William James,

395:The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.-WILLIAM JAMES ~ Anonymous,

396:There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change; (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions. ~ William James,

397:There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other. ~ William James,

398:True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot ~ William James,

399:All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. ~ William James,

400:Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it ~ William James,

401:Be not afraid of life. Believe that it is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact. William James The ~ Robin S Sharma,

402:Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. ~ William James,

403:On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. ~ William James,

404:The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely IMPRESSIVE way to the normal run of minds. ~ William James,

405:The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself. ~ William James,

406:There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. ~ William James,

407:The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. ~ William James,

408:William James said, “The more we struggle and debate, the more we reconsider and delay, the less likely we are to act. ~ Kevin Horsley,

409:On vjeruje u ne-Boga i klanja mu se", rekao je jedan moj kolega o studentu koji je ispoljavao plemeniti ateistički žar. ~ William James,

410:Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities. ~ William James,

411:There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. ~ William James,

412:We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. ~ William James,

413:Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their life. —William James ~ Aleatha Romig,

414:I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly. ~ William James,

415:The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~ William James,

416:To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being. ~ William James,

417:We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. ~ William James,

418:We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate. ~ William James,

419:Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map. ~ William James,

420:The emotions aren’t always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action. —William James ~ Eric Siegel,

421:[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important. ~ William James,

422:Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it. ~ William James,

423:A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first. ~ William James,

424:A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows. ~ William James,

425:For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. ~ William James,

426:Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture. ~ William James,

427:The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. ~ William James,

428:The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances. ~ William James,

429:Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results. ~ William James,

430:It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome. ~ William James,

431:The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. ~ William James,

432:The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. ~ William James,

433: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. ~ William James,

434:Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. ~ William James,

435: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. ~ William James,

436:I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. ~ William James,

437:...the faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction... [p.272] ~ William James,

438:Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. ~ William James,

439:Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. ~ William James,

440:Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit. ~ William James,

441:Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint. ~ William James,

442:In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it. ~ William James,

443:It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods. ~ William James,

444:The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. ~ William James,

445: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! ~ William James,

446: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. ~ William James,

447:Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern. ~ William James,

448:The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And ~ William James,

449:True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience ~ William James,

450:We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. ~ William James,

451:A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him. —William James, The Principles of Psychology ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

452: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. ~ William James,

453:The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse. ~ William James,

454:The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. ~ William James,

455: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 ~ William James,

456:Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. ~ William James,

457:We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. ~ William James,

458:Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. ~ William James,

459:In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. ~ William James,

460:We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be. ~ William James,

461:A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house. ~ William James,

462: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. ~ William James,

463:William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,

464:Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. ~ William James,

465:I will assume for the present---until next year---that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. ~ William James,

466: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. ~ William James,

467: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. ~ William James,

468:William James: „Gdybyśmy pamiętali wszystko, bylibyśmy najczęściej w równie żałosnym stanie, jak wówczas, gdybyśmy nie pamiętali niczego”. ~ Anonymous,

469: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. ~ William James,

470:These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. ~ William James,

471:When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. ~ William James,

472: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. ~ William James,

473:The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. ~ William James,

474: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. ~ William James,

475:Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked. ~ William James,

476:Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. ~ William James,

477:What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition! ~ William James,

478:An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total. ~ William James,

479:Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. ~ William James,

480: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 ~ William James,

481:Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. ~ William James,

482:A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind,” William James once wrote. ~ David Brooks,

483:Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another. ~ William James,

484:There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. ~ William James,

485: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. ~ William James,

486:No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. ~ William James,

487:The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. ~ William James,

488:Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. ~ William James,

489:All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny. ~ William James,

490:A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last. ~ William James,

491:An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses. ~ William James,

492:articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. ~ William James,

493:Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? ~ William James,

494:William James described consciousness as the “alternation of flights and perchings,” suggesting that we tend to overvalue the “perchings,” ========== ~ Anonymous,

495:Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I ~ William James,

496: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. ~ William James,

497:This insistence on "having his say upon the universe" is the profoundest motive of William James thinking as well as of his filial gratitude. ~ Ralph Barton Perry,

498:True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. ~ William James,

499: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. ~ William James,

500: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. ~ William James,

501: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. ~ William James,

502: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. ~ William James,

503:Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. ~ William James,

504:Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. ~ William James,

505: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) ~ William James,

506:Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not. ~ William James,

507: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. ~ William James,

508:The life of religion consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. ~ William James,

509:If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me. ~ William James,

510:La mayoría de la gente vive en un círculo muy restringido de sus posibilidades. Todos nosotros tenemos reservas de vida en las que ni siquiera soñamos. ~ William James,

511: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. ~ William James,

512: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. ~ William James,

513:'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. ~ William James,

514:Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. ~ William James,

515:The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be. ~ William James,

516:There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing ~ William James,

517:The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist. ~ William James,

518: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. ~ William James,

519: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. ~ William James,

520: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. ~ William James,

521:The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may. ~ William James,

522: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. ~ William James,

523:A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock ~ William James,

524: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) ~ William James,

525:If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. ~ William James,

526:Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. ~ William James,

527:How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge. ~ William James,

528:Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind. ~ William James,

529:Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement. ~ William James,

530: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. ~ William James,

531: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. ~ William James,

532:It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own. ~ William James,

533: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. ~ William James,

534: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. ~ William James,

535:Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. ~ William James,

536: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. ~ William James,

537: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 ~ William James,

538:We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. ~ William James,

539:The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. ~ William James,

540: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. ~ William James,

541: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. ~ William James,

542:It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own. ~ William James,

543:Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. ~ William James,

544:The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. ~ William James,

545:A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. ~ William James,

546: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. ~ William James,

547: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. ~ William James,

548: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 ~ William James,

549: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. ~ William James,

550: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 ~ William James,

551: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. ~ William James,

552:Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes a compliment.” William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ Dale Carnegie,

553:So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. ~ William James,

554:Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. ~ William James,

555: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. ~ William James,

556: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. ~ William James,

557:Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of Nature” as objective facts to be revered. ~ William James,

558:I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist. ~ Will Self,

559:Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them. ~ William James,

560:The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed ~ William James,

561: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. ~ William James,

562: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. ~ William James,

563: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,

564:In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common ~ William James,

565:Much of what we call evil can 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 ~ William James,

566: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. ~ William James,

567:How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds. ~ William James,

568:If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest. ~ William James,

569: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. ~ William James,

570: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. ~ William James,

571:If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. ~ William James,

572: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. ~ William James,

573:The attempt at introspective analysis... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness. ~ William James,

574:... 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. ~ William James,

575:Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. ~ William James,

576: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. ~ William James,

577:Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us. ~ William James,

578: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. ~ William James,

579:There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly. ~ William James,

580: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, ~ William James,

581:It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. ~ William James,

582: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 ~ William James,

583:The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings. ~ William James,

584: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. ~ William James,

585:Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude. ~ William James,

586:As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. ~ Tim Wu,

587: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. ~ William James,

588: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. ~ William James,

589: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. ~ William James,

590:Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. ~ William James,

591: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. ~ William James,

592: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 ~ William James,

593: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. ~ William James,

594:We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. ~ William James,

595:Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself. ~ William James,

596:The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees. ~ William James,

597:One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. ~ William James,

598: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. ~ William James,

599:In what did the emancipating message of Christianity consist but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked? ~ William James,

600: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. ~ William James,

601:The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way. ~ William James,

602:The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. ~ William James,

603:The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual? ~ William James,

604: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. ~ William James,

605: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 ~ William James,

606: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. ~ William James,

607: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. ~ William James,

608: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. ~ William James,

609:The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease. ~ William James,

610:Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. ~ William James,

611:A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. ~ William James,

612: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. ~ William James,

613: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. ~ William James,

614: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. ~ William James,

615:An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric. ~ William James,

616:At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? ~ William James,

617:Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them. ~ William James,

618: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. ~ William James,

619: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. ~ William James,

620:Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: “The ~ Dale Carnegie,

621: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. ~ William James,

622: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. ~ William James,

623:Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor. ~ William James,

624: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. ~ William James,

625:Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. William James ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar,

626: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? ~ William James,

627:Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. ~ William James,

628: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. ~ William James,

629: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. ~ William James,

630:Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. ~ William James,

631: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. ~ William James,

632: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. ~ William James,

633:If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before! ~ William James,

634:What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. ~ William James,

635: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. ~ William James,

636:Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. William James The ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar,

637:Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. ~ William James,

638: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. ~ William James,

639:The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. ~ William James,

640:...do every day or two something for no other reason that 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. ~ William James,

641: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. ~ William James,

642:Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling. ~ William James,

643: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. ~ William James,

644:Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. ~ William James,

645:The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. ~ William James,

646:The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. ~ William James,

647: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. ~ William James,

648: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. ~ William James,

649: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. ~ William James,

650:The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. ~ William James,

651:Belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. ~ William James,

652:Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. ~ William James,

653: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. ~ William James,

654:The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. ~ William James,

655:In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body. ~ William James,

656:When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new. ~ William James,

657: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, The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr,

658:[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. ~ William James,

659: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. ~ William James,

660: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. ~ William James,

661:...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. ~ William James,

662:Most people live — whether physically, intellectually or morally — in a very restricted circle of their potential being. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon of which we do not dream. William James ~ Robin S Sharma,

663: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. ~ William James,

664:William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. ~ Robert Wright,

665: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 ~ William James,

666:We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. ~ William James,

667: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. ~ William James,

668:First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. ~ William James,

669:John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ Dale Carnegie,

670:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. ~ John Green,

671: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. ~ William James,

672:There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking. ~ William James,

673:Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. ~ William James,

674: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. ~ William James,

675: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. ~ William James,

676: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. ~ William James,

677: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. ~ William James,

678: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. ~ William James,

679:William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. ~ Bertrand Russell,

680: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. ~ William James,

681:A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new. ~ William James,

682:We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. ~ William James,

683:First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. ~ William James,

684:Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it. ~ William James,

685:Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction ~ William James,

686: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. ~ William James,

687:Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. ~ William James,

688: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. ~ William James,

689: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. ~ William James,

690:Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm. ~ William James,

691:Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. ~ William James,

692: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. ~ William James,

693: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. ~ William James,

694:Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. ~ William James,

695:...our moral and practical attitude....impulses, inhibitions.... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar.... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287] ~ William James,

696: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. ~ William James,

697:William James tells us that we cannot instantly change our emotions just by "making up our minds to"-but that we can change our actions. And that when we change our actions, we will automatically change our feelings. ~ Dale Carnegie,

698:He could think of no one he admired as much as the pioneer himself, William James. The stream of consciousness, the theories on choice and the will, the James-Lange theory of emotions—all important and groundbreaking. ~ Andreas Christensen,

699: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. ~ William James,

700: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. ~ William James,

701:The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. ~ William James,

702: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. ~ William James,

703: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. ~ William James,

704: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. ~ William James,

705: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. ~ William James,

706:The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness! ~ William James,

707: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. ~ William James,

708:Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage. ~ William James,

709:William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth? ~ Johan Huizinga,

710:No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope. ~ William James,

711:There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. ~ William James,

712:A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. ~ William James,

713:To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. ~ William James,

714:Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. ~ William James,

715: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. ~ William James,

716: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. ~ William James,

717:William James, in his “Talks to Teachers,” derided that “ceaseless frenzy” in which we always feel that we “should be doing something else.” The ceaseless frenzy, the race through life, are symptomatic of the numbing of spirituality. ~ Ernest Kurtz,

718: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. ~ William James,

719: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,

720:Why should we think upon things that are lovely Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings. ~ William James,

721:As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. ~ William James,

722:If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war. ~ Roberto Bola o,

723:Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings. ~ William James,

724: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. ~ William James,

725:the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be. ~ William James,

726:No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. ~ William James,

727:We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. ~ William James,

728: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. ~ William James,

729:If this life be 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.” William James ~ Chet Williamson,

730:in our Father's house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation. ~ William James,

731:I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

732: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. ~ William James,

733:All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions. ~ William James,

734: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. ~ William James,

735: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. ~ William James,

736: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. ~ William James,

737: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. ~ William James,

738: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. ~ William James,

739:Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts. ~ William James,

740:Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. ~ William James,

741: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. ~ William James,

742:I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike. ~ William James,

743:Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. ~ William James,

744: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. ~ William James,

745:I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave. ~ William James,

746:Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. ~ William James,

747:Moreover, something is or seems       That touches me with mystic gleams,       Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—      "Of something felt, like something here;       Of something done, I know not where;       Such as no language may declare."[228] ~ William James,

748: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. ~ William James,

749: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. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. ~ William James,

750: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. ~ William James,

751: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. ~ William James,

752: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. ~ William James,

753: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. ~ William James,

754:It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever… ~ William James,

755: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. ~ William James,

756:All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be." - William James ~ Charles Duhigg,

757:As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them. ~ William James,

758:The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs ~ William James,

759:Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist. ~ William James,

760: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. ~ William James,

761:Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! ~ William James,

762:Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. ~ William James,

763: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. ~ William James,

764:We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition ~ William James,

765: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. ~ William James,

766:beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own,—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points. ~ William James,

767:Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or 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. ~ William James,

768: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. ~ William James,

769:But a philosopher named William James responded that sometimes Clifford's advice is bad strategy. He said doubt is the wrong alternative when three conditions are met: when we have live options, when the stakes are momentous, and when we must make a choice.3 ~ John Ortberg Jr,

770: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. ~ William James,

771: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. ~ William James,

772:The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks. ~ William James,

773: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. ~ William James,

774:Psychologist William James said, "That which holds our attention determines our action." In other words, your behavior follows your attitude. The two cannot be separated. As author LeRoy Eims says, "How can you know what is in your heart? Look at your behavior. ~ John C Maxwell,

775:In his 1890 masterpiece The Principles of Psychology, William James argued that the ability to fix one’s attention on a stimulus or a thought and “hold it fast before the mind” was the act that constituted “the essential achievement of the will. ~ JM Schwartz & Sharon Begley,

776:True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as. ~ William James,

777:The same outer object may suggest either of many realities formerly associated with it—for in the vicissitudes of our outer experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing in the midst of differing companions. William James, The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr,

778:Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair. ~ William James,

779:The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. ~ William James,

780:Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interiour world which otherwise would be an empty waste. ~ William James,

781:The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. ~ William James,

782: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. ~ William James,

783: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. ~ William James,

784: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. —WILLIAM JAMES, “The Will to Believe” If ~ Daniel C Dennett,

785:Who says “hypothesis” renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. ~ William James,

786: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. ~ William James,

787:Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. ~ William James,

788:General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. ~ William James,

789: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. ~ William James,

790:As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. ~ Tim Wu,

791:I was also moved by William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which not only helped me put my childhood experience in perspective but also showed me how my search to find a new, more authentic spiritual identity fit within the vast landscape of American culture. ~ Phil Jackson,

792: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. ~ William James,

793: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. ~ William James,

794:... 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. ~ William James,

795: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. ~ William James,

796:When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable ~ William James,

797:how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. ~ William James,

798:We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. ~ William James,

799:The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ~ William James,

800:The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. ~ William James,

801: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. ~ William James,

802: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. ~ William James,

803: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. ~ William James,

804: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. ~ William James,

805:The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. ~ William James,

806:A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. ~ William James,

807:It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true. ~ William James,

808: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. ~ William James,

809: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. ~ William James,

810: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. ~ William James,

811:We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is. ~ William James,

812:Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. ~ William James,

813:He believes in No-God, and he worships him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal. ~ William James,

814:Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods. ~ Howard Bloom,

815: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. ~ William James,

816:It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law. ~ William James,

817:...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. ~ William James,

818: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. ~ William James,

819:The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter. ~ William J Bennett,

820:The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn’t make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. ~ William James,

821:Edwards says elsewhere: "I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe. ~ William James,

822:We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals. ~ William James,

823:The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all. ~ William James,

824: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. ~ William James,

825:Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. ~ William James,

826: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. ~ William James,

827:William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. ~ Bertrand Russell,

828: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. ~ William James,

829: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. ~ William James,

830: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!. ~ William James,

831:We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying. ~ William James,

832: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. ~ William James,

833: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. ~ William James,

834:Toda a nossa vida, na medida que tem forma definida, não passa de uma massa de hábitos - práticos, emocionais e intelectuais - sistematicamente organizados para nossa felicidade ou nosso sofrimento e nos conduzindo irresistivelmente rumo a nosso destino, qualquer que seja ele - no livro O poder do hábito ~ William James,

835:Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. ~ William James,

836:The history of philosophy is, to a great extent, that of a certain clash of human temperaments…Of whatever temperament a philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament…Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. ~ William James,

837:Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy' ~ William James,

838:To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. ~ William James,

839: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. ~ William James,

840:When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine. ~ Nicholas Carr,

841: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. ~ William James,

842: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. ~ William James,

843:A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks. ~ William James,

844: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. ~ William James,

845: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!” —William James ~ Todd Henry,

846:psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. ~ William James,

847:The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out. ~ William James,

848:The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. ~ William James,

849:But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. ~ William James,

850:But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points. ~ William James,

851:Who are the scholars who get ‘rattled’ in the recitation room?” asked William James. “Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their memories of their own accord. ~ Maxwell Maltz,

852: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. ~ William James,

853: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. ~ William James,

854:It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law. ~ William James,

855: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. ~ William James,

856:For at least a century, psychologists and philosophers have suggested that our urge to explain the world is analogous to our urge to populate it. Like making babies, they argue, making theories is so crucial to our survival that we have a natural drive to do so - what William James called a "theoretic instinct." (p.96) ~ Kathryn Schulz,

857: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. ~ William James,

858:There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one's self: 'A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, bids you set sail. Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, weathered the gal. ~ William James,

859:There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. ~ William James,

860:There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. ~ William James,

861: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. ~ William James,

862:Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation. ~ William James,

863:Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. ~ William James,

864: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. ~ William James,

865: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. ~ William James,

866: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. ~ William James,

867: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. ~ William James,

868:The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then. ~ William James,

869:I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. ~ William James,

870: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. ~ William James,

871:Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. ~ William James,

872:Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. ~ William James,

873: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. ~ William James,

874:Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice until itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. ~ William James,

875: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. ~ William James,

876:Faith is one of the forces by which men live,” said philosopher and psychologist William James, and he was right. People act by faith when they step into an elevator, order food in a restaurant, drive on the highway, or say their marriage vows. The Christian believer lives by faith in the living God and what He has revealed in His Word. ~ Warren W Wiersbe,

877: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. ~ William James,

878: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. ~ William James,

879:No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, ~ William James,

880:William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir. ~ Madeleine L Engle,

881: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. ~ William James,

882:But the very instant we break the law, we shall get into endless trouble. The law is this: Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. ~ Dale Carnegie,

883:... 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. ~ William James,

884:Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. ~ William James, The Sentiment of Rationality (1882).,

885: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? ~ William James,

886:Life is getting through the moment. The philosopher William James says to cultivate the cheerful attitude. Now nobody had more trouble than he did -- except me. I had more trouble in my life than anybody. But your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble, you'll probably make it through the next one. ~ Ruth Gordon,

887:When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. ~ Tim Wu,

888:Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. ~ William James,

889: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. ~ William James,

890:the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. ~ William James,

891:Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. ~ William James,

892: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. ~ William James,

893: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. ~ William James,

894:Lectures IV and V - The Religion Of Healthy Mindedness If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." 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. ~ William James,

895:The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's 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. ~ William James,

896:William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it. ~ Alain de Botton,

897:En comparación con lo que deberíamos ser -decía el famoso profesor William James, de la Universidad de Harvard-, sólo estamos despiertos a medias. Sólo empleamos una pequeña parte de nuestros recursos físicos y mentales. En términos generales, el individuo vive así muy dentro de sus límites Posee cualidades de diversas especies que habitualmente no usa. ~ Dale Carnegie,

898:In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. ~ William James,

899: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. ~ William James,

900:Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure. ~ William James,

901: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 intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. —William James, “The World We Live In ~ Ellen J Langer,

902: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. ~ William James,

903:Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important. ~ William James,

904: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. ~ William James,

905:I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. ~ William James,

906:Ultra god Scott Jurek summed up the Young Guns’ unofficial creed with a quote from William James he stuck on the end of every e-mail he sent: “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.” As ~ Christopher McDougall,

907: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. ~ William James,

908: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. ~ William James,

909:The world is one,' therefore, just so far as we experience it to be concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also NOT one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find. The oneness and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately named. It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. ~ William James,

910:[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on. ~ William James,

911: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. ~ William James,

912:Believe truth! Shun error!-these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. ~ William James,

913: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. ~ William James,

914: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,

915: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. ~ William James,

916: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. ~ William James,

917: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. ~ William James,

918:Compared to what we ought to be,” said the famous Professor William James of Harvard, “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 powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. ~ Dale Carnegie,

919:Plasticity … 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. Organic matters, especially nervous tissues, seem to be endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort ... ~ William James,

920:The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks. ~ William James,

921: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. ~ William James,

922:Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery. ~ William James,

923:[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on. ~ William James,

924:American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, “that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me! ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin,

925:PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy. WESLEY: But William James won't be in my Starfleet exams. PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship. WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something. ~ Gene Roddenberry,

926:Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. ~ William James,

927: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. ~ William James,

928:What our human emotions seem to require, is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to the uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing that inspires us. ~ William James,

929:The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed; and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth ~ William James,

930: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. ~ William James,

931:The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall. ~ William James,

932:A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. ~ William James,

933:But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them “nothing but” expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue. ~ William James,

934: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. ~ William James,

935:Some years ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept three young men awake for four days and nights. When his observations on them were finished, the subjects were permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his long vigil only slept one-third more time than was regular with him. ~ William James,

936:It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no results. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. ~ William James,

937: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. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. ~ William James,

938:William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'. ~ Bertrand Russell,

939:William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout. ~ Bertrand Russell,

940:Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. ~ William James,

941:If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. ~ William James,

942:Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one. It is the pragmatic test suggested by William James, quoting Jesus: “By their fruits you shall know them.” The fruit is love. Indeed, such fruit is the purpose of the Christian life. ~ Marcus J Borg,

943: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. ~ William James,

944:Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him. ~ William James,

945: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? ~ William James,

946:Inspiring all Holmes's championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. "The great act of faith," he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), "is when man decides that he is not God." On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his "discovery I was not God" was his "secret of success. ~ Daniel J Boorstin,

947:Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing. ~ William James,

948:Scott Jurek resumió el credo no oficial de los Jóvenes Pistoleros con una cita de William James que usaba para cerrar todos los emails que enviaba: «Más allá de lo extremo de la fatiga y el sufrimiento, encontramos cantidades de alivio y poder que nunca habíamos soñado con poseer; fuentes de fortaleza nunca antes puestas a prueba porque nunca habíamos empujado la puerta de oclusión». Conforme ~ Christopher McDougall,

949:Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things. ~ William James,

950:The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? ~ William James,

951: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. ~ William James,

952:I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. ~ William James,

953: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. ~ William James,

954:Since novelty is what your brain craves, you’ll be tempted to move on to something new, and that could be what makes the most sense. However, if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. “The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn. ~ Angela Duckworth,

955:The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. ~ William James,

956:For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life. Briefly it is this, that nothing real is absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related, that each relation is one aspect, character, or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking something else. ~ William James,

957:The art of remembering is the art of thinking and by adding, with Dr.Pick, that, when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall. ~ William James,

958: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. ~ William James,

959: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. ~ William James,

960:We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not. ~ William James,

961: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. ~ William James,

962: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. ~ William James,

963:If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. ~ William James,

964:For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The ~ Tim Wu,

965:If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if martyrs sang in the fire... for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract... their contented and inoffensive lives, why, at such a rate... better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up. ~ William James,

966: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. ~ William James,

967:The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. ~ William James,

968: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. ~ William James,

969:O intalnire cu filozoful William James mi-a lasat o impresie de neuitat. Nu am putut sa nu tin minte aceasta scena: in cursul unei plimbari, el s-a oprit deodata, mi-a incredintat servieta si m-a rugat sa continui drumul, el avand sa ma urmeze de indata ce ii va fi trecut criza de anghina pectorala pe care o presimtea. A murit de inima un an mai tarziu; n-am incetat sa-mi doresc un asemenea curaj in fata sfarsitului apropiat. ~ Sigmund Freud,

970:Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. ~ William James,

971:Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

972:That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief. ~ William James,

973:Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'. ~ William James,

974:This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America's greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,

975:Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. ~ William James,

976:Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities. ~ William James,

977: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. ~ William James,

978:But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man! ~ Robert D Richardson Jr,

979:The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James,

980:The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James,

981:The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James,

982:This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. ~ William James,

983: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. ~ William James,

984:Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution. ~ William James,

985: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. ~ William James,

986:But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction. ~ Michael Pollan,

987:Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. ~ William James,

988: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. ~ William James,

989:If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole. ~ William James,

990:If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."[11] ~ William James,

991:The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. 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. ~ William James,

992:I CAN, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. ~ William James,

993:It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. ~ William James,

994:I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to be melted down with love, the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help, ~ William James,

995: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. ~ William James,

996:In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day…. There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence…. The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine. ~ William James,

997:It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. ~ William James,

998:We have then walked, played, or worked " enough," so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. ~ William James,

999:We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul. ~ Steven Kotler,

1000:It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. 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. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. ~ William James,

1001:Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules. ~ William James,

1002:Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. ~ William James,

1003:The Count of Monte Cristo would put it better: “What a fool I was not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!” Ah, but what dangerous business this is. This artificial hardening is a dangerous crossroads, a bargain with our primal forces that not everyone escapes or can emerge from with clean hands. William James knew that every man is “ready to be savage in some cause.” The distinction, he said, between good people and bad people is “the choice of the cause. ~ Ryan Holiday,

1004:Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.” William James, Pragmatism ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,

1005:To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over... What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass. ~ William James,

1006:However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. ~ William James,

1007:However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. ~ William James,

1008: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. ~ William James,

1009:(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. ~ William James,

1010:In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James placed alcohol at the very center of the religious experience. “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature,” he writes, which are “usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. ~ Michael Pollan,

1011: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. ~ William James,

1012:The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? ~ William James,

1013:Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. ~ William James,

1014:Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits. ~ William James,

1015: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. ~ William James,

1016:There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity. ~ William James,

1017: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! ~ William James,

1018:William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. ~ Bertrand Russell,

1019:ELSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as “Mrs. Piper,” the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic. Alta seemed to share her mother’s gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, she heard a voice telling her, “If you get into your berth, you’ll never get out. ~ Erik Larson,

1020:Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. ~ William James,

1021:The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves. As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL. William James, The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr,

1022: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. ~ William James,

1023:What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared. ~ William James,

1024:This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. . . . Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. —Rumi A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him. —William James, The Principles of Psychology ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

1025: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. ~ William James,

1026:If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare . . . we should be able to show why . . . his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we . . . call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein . . . without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare’s mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple. ~ William James,

1027: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. ~ William James,

1028:The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function. ~ William James,

1029: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. ~ William James,

1030:Common-Law judges sometimes talk about the law, and schoolmasters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflection makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. [...] Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. ~ William James,

1031:The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them—not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it. When I was little, I used to tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, “Just don’t think about that stuff, Aza.” But Davis got it. You can’t choose. That’s the problem. ~ John Green,

1032:It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective. ~ David Berman,

1033:You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. ~ William James,

1034:Four Characters in Consciousness—How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way: 1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous. 4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while. ~ William James,

1035:Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain. ~ William James,

1036:If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples; if it be unfamiliar, make it figure as part of a story; if it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your subject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity being the secret of all interesting talk and thought. ~ William James,

1037: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. ~ William James,

1038:We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,--these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A. ~ William James,

1039: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? ~ William James,

1040:Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible…[T]o make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal ~ William James,

1041: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 has 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 its possessor's body at the time. ~ William James,

1042:What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. ~ William James,

1043: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. ~ William James,

1044:The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James,

1045: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. ~ William James,

1046:Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gently tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. ~ Robert Lowell,

1047:I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr. Carpenter's words) grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds. ~ William James,

1048: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. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ~ William James,

1049: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. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. ~ William James,

1050:Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that 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. 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. ~ William James,

1051:James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James’s angry statement: “God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles. ~ Howard Zinn,

1052:Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination…. I showed them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me:—they were my actual dispositions. ~ William James,

1053:Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung ahead of the advancing edge of a wave crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy. ~ William James,

1054:William James wrote (in Principles of Psychology in 1890): "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 of 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 contentless units..." Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. ~ Joshua Foer,

1055:Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of its parts—whatever that may mean—in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes. ~ William James,

1056:There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by immitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. ~ William James,

1057:When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary. ~ William James,

1058:In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reënacted in human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life. ~ William James,

1059:Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible…Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal… ~ William James,

1060:It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. 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. ~ William James,

1061:As the great William James put it almost 80 years ago: A man’s “Me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, his yacht and his bank-account (1892, p. 44). In other words, the human animal can be symbolically located wherever he feels a part of him really exists or belongs. This is important for an understanding of the bitter fighting between social classes for social status: an individual’s house in a posh neighborhood can be more a part of his self-image than his own arm—his life-pulse can be inseparable from it. ~ Ernest Becker,

1062:There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. ~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1,

1063: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. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded. How to regard them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness ~ William James,

1064:To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!... To be this incredible God I am!... O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth.... I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues—glory continues. I praise with electric voice, For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last." So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:— ~ William James,

1065:quite opposite to Descartes’s organ metaphor, our global neuronal workspace does not operate in an input-output manner, waiting to be stimulated before producing its outputs. On the contrary, even in full darkness, it ceaselessly broadcasts global patterns of neural activity, causing what William James called the “stream of consciousness”—an uninterrupted flow of loosely connected thoughts, primarily shaped by our current goals and only occasionally seeking information in the senses. René Descartes could not have imagined a machine of this sort, where intentions, thoughts, and plans continually pop up to shape our behavior. The outcome, I argue, is a “free-willing” machine that resolves Descartes’s challenge ~ Stanislas Dehaene,

1066:He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe... This fear he slavishly obeys... For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world... It is like a general informing his soliders that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not so awfully solumn things. In a world where we are certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. ~ William James,

1067:As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,

1068:During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all her troubles to God in prayer. Every night before we went to bed, Mother would read a chapter from the Bible; frequently Mother or Father would read these comforting words of Jesus: “In my Father’s house are many mansions…. I go to prepare a place for you … that where I am, there ye may be also.” Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God’s love and protection. When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said, “Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.” You don’t have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri farm. ~ Dale Carnegie,

1069:The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's 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. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this 'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. ~ William James,

1070: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. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief. ~ William James,

1071:I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. ~ William James,

1072:Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. 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. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. ~ William James,

1073:Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. ~ Joshua Foer,

1074:No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A ‘character,’ as J. S. Mill says, ‘is a completely fashioned will’; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use. ~ William James,

1075:The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James,

1076:I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully — and losing it — just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote. ~ William James,

1077:Why and how does this person switch gears, activating circuits in the dorsal prefrontal cortex connecting to adaptive basal ganglia circuits, rather than the OCD circuits connecting the orbital frontal cortex to the anterior cingulate and caudate? (See Figure 4.) At the instant of activation, both circuits—one encoding your walk to the garden to prune roses, the other a rush to the sink to wash—are ready to go. Yet something in the mind is choosing one brain circuit over another. Something is causing one circuit to become activated and one to remain quiescent. What is that something? William James posed the question this way: “We reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask, by what process is it that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably in the mind? ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,

1078:The authors determined the completeness of a mystical experience using two questionnaires, including the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which is based in part on William James’s writing in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” The questionnaire measures feelings of unity, sacredness, ineffability, peace and joy, as well as the impression of having transcended space and time and the “noetic sense” that the experience has disclosed some objective truth about reality. A “complete” mystical experience is one that exhibits all six characteristics. Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion such a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does. ~ Anonymous,

1079:Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? ~ William James,

1080:William James said: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and it will become infallibly real by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief." He also said,"If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich. If you wish to be learned, you will be learned. If you wish to be good, you will be good - 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. ~ Earl Nightingale,

1081:HERE’S WHAT I DON’T GET about an experience like Bob Jesse’s: Why in the world would you ever credit it at all? I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t simply file it under “interesting dream” or “drug-induced fantasy.” But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction. As James wrote, “Dreams cannot stand this test.” No doubt this is why some of the people who have such an experience go on to found religions, ~ Michael Pollan,

1082:If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the crime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her. If in the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively connive at my destruction. He who commands himself not to be credulous of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side or the other. ~ William James,

1083:It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. ~ William James,

1084:We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life- destroying draft. Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more ~ William James,

1085:William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Wheather the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was less of a concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious charlatans or liars in the ordinary sense, nor were they confabulators or phantasm. They were, he came to feel, in altered states of consciousness conducive to hallucinations - hallucinations whose content was shaped by the questions they were asked. These exceptional mental states, he thought, were achieved by self-hypnosis, no doubt facilitated by poorly lit and ambiguous surroundings and the eager expectations of their clients. ~ Oliver Sacks,

1086:How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years. ~ William James,

1087:The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory)—how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called “unspeakable” and “indiscribable,” the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with “the occult” and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .”; Melville referred to “that profound silence, that only voice of God”; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found “more divine than yourself. ~ Peter Matthiessen,

1088:In endeavoring to answer the question, "Is Life Worth Living?" William James pointed out that the psychological conditions that supplement the biologists' observations upon parasitism show that organic activities of the highest sort oscillate between two poles: positive and negative, pleasure and pain, good and bad; and that an attempt to live in terms of the positive, the pleasurable, and the plentiful alone destroys the very polarity needed for the full expression of life. "It is, indeed, a remarkable fact," observed James, "that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate love of life; they seem on the contrary to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite us; our hour of triumph is what brings a 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. ~ Lewis Mumford,

1089:I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. ~ Michael Pollan,

1090:See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. ~ William James,

1091:Justo cuando pensábamos que la pelea había terminado, va y me saca el refrito sin sentido de algo que pasó hace años". ¿Y qué podemos hacer ante todo esto? ¿Cómo comercializar la 'Guía William James' de autoayuda en las relaciones personales? De una forma obvia. Intentando contrarrestar esa locomotora con mente propia en que se convierte el sistema nervioso autónomo. ¿Cómo hacerlo? (...) Antes de contestarlo, tiene que respirar profundamente o parar y contar hasta diez. Oblíguese a discutir estando sentados (esto ralentizará el flujo de adrenalina). También puede utilizar la cognición como munición: hable sobre este tema de la activación autónoma con su pareja de forma que ambos atajen el fenómeno: "Oye, ¿crees que estamos teniendo uno de esos momentos a lo William James?". Las relaciones ya pueden ser lo bastante problemáticas para que encima nuestras glándulas se dediquen a inventarnos complicaciones existentes. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

1092:… Communities repeat their central myths, the stories that make them a “cult” and give them an identity, in order to provide them a sense of social continuity. And so Americans tell themselves their “founding” stories over and over again, even though some of them are quite deranged and self-destructive: how the Founding Fathers were the homogenous embodiment of wisdom (when in fact the hated one another, mostly along Federalist and Republican lines); how these wise fathers created a Christian nation “under god” (when in fact many of them - Jefferson, Paine, Franklin - were Deistic skeptics) ; how the Second Amendment means that we all have the right to carry assault rifles; how everyone should strive for the American Dream understood as “success,” that “American bitch goddess” (William James), and so on. Deranged though they may be, these stories are comforting for many Americans, and so to challenge them is to invite vigorous debate if not a fistfight. ~ Curtis White,

1093:What would have happened if Einstein had advanced something equally new in the sphere of religion or politics? English people would have found elements of Prussianism in his theory; anti-Semites would have regarded it as a Zionist plot; nationalists in all countries would have found it tainted with lily-livered pacifism, and proclaimed it a mere dodge for escaping military service. All the old-fashioned professors would have approached Scotland Yard to get the importation of his writings prohibited. Teachers favourable to him would have been dismissed. He, meantime, would have captured the Government of some backward country, where it would have become illegal to teach anything except his doctrine, which would have grown into a mysterious dogma not understood by anybody. Ultimately the truth or falsehood of his doctrine would be decided on the battlefield, without the collection of any fresh evidence for or against it. This method is the logical outcome of William James’s will to believe. ~ Bertrand Russell,

1094:This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. ~ William James,

1095:I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest."[130] ~ William James,

1096:I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ...I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy... but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism... gave... lectures... with that very word in its title,—flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us... understood all that he said—yet here I stand making a very similar venture. ...There is... a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. ~ William James, Pragmatism (1907),

1097:Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist of the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims. ~ William James,

1098:Perhaps this sacrifice has been more willingly made because the 'conquest of space' has proved, if temporarily, the only substitute yet available for harnessing the immense consumptive needs and destructive powers of the megamachine, without actually bringing about the catastrophic end of that machine itself in collective deeds of calculated genocide, which would defoliate the planet and exfoliate the human race. The rivalry between the Russian and the American megamachines, in their race to land on the moon or explore the nearer planets, might thus be considered a sophisticated though superstitious substitute for William James' "moral equivalent of war." But since such space rivalry leaves all the present weapons for annihilating mankind in existence, and in fact increases their lethal potentialities,t his form of collective competition holds forth no better promise of ensuring permanent comity than do those international soccer matches which so frequently end in demonstrations of more intense hostility and outright violence. ~ Lewis Mumford,

1099:your fellow human beings, you will find it hard to ignore the fact that very few people are happy, fulfilled, and leading purposeful lives. Most of them seem unable to cope with their problems and the circumstances of daily living. The majority, settling for the average, have resigned themselves to “just getting by.” Resignation to mediocrity has become a way of life. As a result, feelings of inadequacy cause people, quite humanly, to blame society, other people, circumstances, and surrounding conditions for their failures and disappointments. The idea that people and things control their lives is so thoroughly ingrained in their thinking that they normally will not respond to logical arguments that prove otherwise. William James, the eminent philosopher and psychologist, once observed that, “The greatest discovery of our age has been that we, by changing the inner aspects of our thinking, can change the outer aspects of our lives.” Wrapped up in this brief statement is the dynamic truth that we are not victims, but co-creators in the building of our lives and the ~ Robert Anthony,

1100:Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. 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 pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again. ~ William James,

1101:...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me? But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out. ...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ... ...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches." -Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927. ~ Dorothy Parker,

1102:4. Give recognition and show appreciation. “The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology. It is impossible to be motivated and do great work if you don’t feel that somebody cares and appreciates what you do. Studies have shown that for people to be happy and productive at work, they need to experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1. (Watch out: For a marriage to work, you actually need a 5:1 ratio!!) So make it a simple habit to thank people each and every day — and that includes using the word generously in emails to your team. The way people want to receive recognition varies greatly: public vs. private, material vs. immaterial, from peers vs. from superiors, etc. Great managers test different approaches and observe reactions until they find the triggers that work best with each of their people. At MOM’s Organic Market, managers will sometimes publicly recognize employees who have performed well, but CEO Scott Nash has often found that one-on-one comments are most effective. ~ Verne Harnish,

1103:This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner ~ William James,

1104:Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more for its omissions of fact, for its ignorance of whole ranges and orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short. ~ William James,

1105:Behind the picture of fresh human possibilities I have been drawing all through 'The Myth of the Machine' is a profound truth to which almost a century ago William James gave expression. "When from our present advanced standpoint," he observed, "we look back upon past stages of human thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing....There is nothing in the spirit and principles of science that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting point of new effects. The only form of thing we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science's part of the personality as a a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short. ~ Lewis Mumford,

1106:Many of the principles Dale Carnegie writes about in How to Win Friends and Influence People apply directly to communication. Keep the following points in mind: • To get the best of an argument—avoid it. • Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never tell a person he or she is wrong. • If you are wrong, admit it quickly, emphatically. • Begin in a friendly way. Get the other person saying “yes” immediately. • Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. • Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers. • Speak softly. • Smile appropriately. • If a confrontation can’t be avoided, don’t feel you have to get an unconditional surrender. Always give the other person an opening for an honorable retreat. RESOLVING CONFLICT This intelligent approach to resolving conflicts is not as easy as it may sound. Sometimes you may not feel calm, rational, or open-minded. The psychologist William James wrote, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.” In other words, when you adopt the actions of a calm, rational person, you become calm and rational. When you act open-minded, your mind actually opens up. And almost magically, the person with whom you are interacting mirrors those behaviors and adopts the same feelings. ~ Dale Carnegie,

1107:Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “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 of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “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 contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed. ~ Joshua Foer,

1108:It would no doubt be shocking to reckon the macroeconomic price of all our time spent with the attention merchants, if only to alert us to the drag on our own productivity quotient, the economist’s measure of all our efforts. At bottom, whether we acknowledge it or not, the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race, insofar as that future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states. Does that sound like exaggeration? It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and, even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all. If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living. ~ Tim Wu,

1109:We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects. ~ William James,

1110:The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. 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. We are spinning our fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well! He may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many 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 keeps faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. ~ William James,

1111:Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking. These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything, there's an end of the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium. Pragmatism, on the other hand, 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?" The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. ~ William James,

1112:But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt. ~ William James,

1113:The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. 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 stood there 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. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab! ~ William James,

1114:In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence," "teeming desert," are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. "He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.. . . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat."[277] [277] H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence. These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. ~ William James,

1115:Maslow used an apt term for this evasion of growth, this fear of realizing one's own fullest powers. He called it the "Jonah Syndrome." He understood the syndrome as the evasion of the full intensity of life: We are just not strong enough to endure more! It is just too shaking and wearing. So often people in...ecstatic moments say, "It's too much," or "I can't stand it," or "I could die"....Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness.... The Jonah Syndrome, then, seen from this basic point of view, is "partly a justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control, of being shattered and disintegrated, eve of being killed by the experience." And the result of this syndrome is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life: For some people this evasion of one's own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity... It all boils down to a simple lack of strength to bear the superlative, to open oneself to the totality of experience-an idea that was well appreciated by William James and more recently was developed in phenomenological terms in the classic work of Rudolf Otto. Otto talked about the terror of the world, the feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation-the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all. What Otto did was to get descriptively at man's natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; his real creature feeling before the crushing negating miracle of Being. ~ Ernest Becker,

1116:It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year [Footnote: Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to develope a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception. The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the 'pragmatic movement' spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has 'come to stay. ~ William James,

1117:Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self. ~ William James,

1118: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 belief, 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. Our past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old. New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists - you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out. My thesis now is this, that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. ~ William James,

1119:Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. 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 or do 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. 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. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~ William James,

1120:Next Day Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering flocks Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James, Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom. Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves And the boy takes it to my station wagon, What I’ve become Troubles me even if I shut my eyes. When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I’d wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me. For so many years I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me, The eyes of strangers! And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile Imaginings within my imagining, I too have taken The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog And we start home. Now I am good. The last mistaken, Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm Some soap and water-- It was so long ago, back in some Gay Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss My lovely daughter Away at school, my sons away at school, My husband away at work--I wish for them. The dog, the maid, And I go through the sure unvarying days At home in them. As I look at my life, I am afraid Only that it will change, as I am changing: I am afraid, this morning, of my face. It looks at me From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look Of gray discovery Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old. And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral I went to yesterday. My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers, Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body Were my face and body. As I think of her I hear her telling me How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I’m anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary. ~ Randall Jarrell,

1121:a new teaching appointment required that I become familiar with mysticism in Christianity and other religions. That’s when I realized that these were mystical experiences. Especially important was William James’s classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published more than a century ago, still in print, and named by a panel of experts in 1999 as the second most important nonfiction book published in English in the twentieth century. The book combines the elements that made up James himself: a psychologist fascinated by the varieties of human consciousness, and a philosopher pondering what all of this might mean.1 Part of his book is about mystical experiences. Based on James’s study of accounts of such experiences, he concluded that their two primary features are “illumination” and “union.” Illumination has a twofold meaning. The experiences often involve light, luminosity, radiance. Moreover, they involve “enlightenment,” a new way of seeing. “Union” (or “communion”) refers to the experience of connectedness and the disappearance or softening of the distinction between self and world. In addition, James names four other common features: Ineffability. The experiences are difficult, even impossible, to express in words. Yet those who have such experiences often try, usually preceded by, “It’s really hard to describe, but it was like . . .” Transiency. They are usually brief; they come and then go. Passivity. One cannot make them happen through active effort. They come upon one—one receives them. Noetic quality. They include a vivid sense of knowing (and not just intense feelings of joy, wonder, amazement)—a nonverbal, nonlinguistic way of knowing marked by a strong sense of seeing more clearly and certainly than one ever has. What is known is “the way things are” when all of our language falls away and we see “what is” without the domestication created by our words and categories. This way of knowing might be called direct cognition, a way of knowing not mediated through language. Reading James and other writers on mysticism was amazing. In colloquial language, I was blown away. I found my experiences described with great precision. Suddenly, I had a way of naming and understanding them. Moreover, they were linked to the experiences of many people. They are a mode of human consciousness. They happen. And ~ Marcus J Borg,

1122:The Poet The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry His power is his left hand It is idle weak and precious His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was On land or sea. He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess That extreme form of success. He may suffer Narcissus' destiny Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation Love, blind, adoring, overflowing Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately. ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence? I would give to Satan my immortal soul." This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem, Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth's banality, vulgarity, pomp and affectation of his early works of poetry. So too in the same way a Famous American Poet When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies of his first book of poems which had been privately printed by himself at his own expense. He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them And learned then how the last copies were extant, As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital, at the Library of Congress. Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two 86 copies Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author, Since they were his books and his property he was reproached But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him Thus setting a national precedent. For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems, For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record your acts for the rest of eternity." What a terrifying thing to say! This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry. This is also the joy everlasting of poetry. ~ Delmore Schwartz,

1123:THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS. 'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart? Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation. I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER BELIEFS when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. ~ William James,

1124:It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief. Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. ~ William James,

1125:reading :::    50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:    Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)    St Augustine - Confessions (400)    Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)    Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)    Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)    Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)    Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)    GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)    Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)    Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)    Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)    Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)    Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)    Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)    Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)    GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)    Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)    Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)    Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)    Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)    William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)    Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)    Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)    J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)    CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)    Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)    Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)    Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)    W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)    Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)    Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)    John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)    Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)    James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)    Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)    Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)    Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)    Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)    Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)    Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)    Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)    Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)    Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)    Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)    Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)    Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)    Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)    Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)    Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)    Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),

1126:reading :::    50 Philosophy Classics: List of Books Covered:    1. Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)    2. Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (4th century BC)    3. AJ Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic (1936)    4. Julian Baggini - The Ego Trick (2011)    5. Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)    6. Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1952)    7. Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)    8. Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution (1911)    9. David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)    10. Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power (2002)    11. Cicero - On Duties (44 BC)    12. Confucius - Analects (5th century BC)    13. Rene Descartes - Meditations (1641)    14. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Fate (1860)    15. Epicurus - Letters (3rd century BC)    16. Michel Foucault - The Order of Things (1966)    17. Harry Frankfurt - On Bullshit (2005)    18. Sam Harris - Free Will (2012)    19. GWF Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit (1803)    20. Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (1927)    21. Heraclitus - Fragments (6th century)    22. David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)    23. William James - Pragmatism (1904)    24. Daniel Kahneman - Thinking: Fast and Slow (2011)    25. Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)    26. Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling (1843)    27. Saul Kripke - Naming and Necessity (1972)    28. Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)    29. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Theodicy (1710)    30. John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)    31. Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage (1967)    32. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince (1532)    33. John Stuart Mill - On Liberty (1859)    34. Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)    35. Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good (1970)    36. Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil (1886)    37. Blaise Pascal - Pensees (1670)    38. Plato - The Republic (4th century BC)    39. Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)    40. John Rawls - A Theory of Justice (1971)    41. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract (1762)    42. Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness (1920)    43. Michael Sandel - Justice (2009)    44. Jean Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness (1943)    45. Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation (1818)    46. Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save (2009)    47. Baruch Spinoza - Ethics (1677)    48. Nassim Nicholas - Taleb The Black Swan (2007)    49. Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations (1953)    50. Slavoj Zizek - Living In The End Times (2010)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics,

1127:The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability....But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs. .... Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively. THE TENDER-MINDED Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical. THE TOUGH-MINDED Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical. ~ William James,

1128:MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic: Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think ~ William James,

1129:Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED. THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions. All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS. ~ William James,

1130:reading :::    50 Psychology Classics: List of Books Covered:    Alfred Adler - Understanding Human Nature (1927)    Gordon Allport - The Nature of Prejudice (1954)    Albert Bandura - Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997)    Gavin Becker - The Gift of Fear (1997)    Eric Berne - Games People Play (1964)    Isabel Briggs Myers - Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type (1980)    Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain (2006)    David D Burns - Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980)    Susan Cain - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (2012)    Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984)    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity (1997)    Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006)    Albert Ellis & Robert Harper - (1961) A Guide To Rational Living(1961)    Milton Erickson - My Voice Will Go With You (1982) by Sidney Rosen    Eric Erikson - Young Man Luther (1958)    Hans Eysenck - Dimensions of Personality (1947)    Viktor Frankl - The Will to Meaning (1969)    Anna Freud - The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936)    Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams (1901)    Howard Gardner - Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983)    Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling on Happiness (2006)    Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)    Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence at Work (1998)    John M Gottman - The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work (1999)    Temple Grandin - The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed (2013)    Harry Harlow - The Nature of Love (1958)    Thomas A Harris - I'm OK - You're OK (1967)    Eric Hoffer - The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)    Karen Horney - Our Inner Conflicts (1945)    William James - Principles of Psychology (1890)    Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1953)    Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)    Alfred Kinsey - Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)    RD Laing - The Divided Self (1959)    Abraham Maslow - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1970)    Stanley Milgram - Obedience To Authority (1974)    Walter Mischel - The Marshmallow Test (2014)    Leonard Mlodinow - Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012)    IP Pavlov - Conditioned Reflexes (1927)    Fritz Perls - Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951)    Jean Piaget - The Language and Thought of the Child (1966)    Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)    VS Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain (1998)    Carl Rogers - On Becoming a Person (1961)    Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970)    Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004)    Martin Seligman - Authentic Happiness (2002)    BF Skinner - Beyond Freedom & Dignity (1953)    Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen - Difficult Conversations (2000)    William Styron - Darkness Visible (1990)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics,

1131:I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own. You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough. But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. The End ~ William James,

1132:Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders. But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. 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 a 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. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean. Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. 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. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED. ~ William James,

1133:76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces ~ Mortimer J Adler,

1134:And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it. ~ William James,

1135:Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words: That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved—even as our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results? No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES—we now know THAT. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT—not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes. The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate. ~ William James,

1136:In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?" Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice? Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy- minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one ~ William James,

1137:What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing). ~ Colin Wilson,

1138:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study    Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.    The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.    Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.    Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.    Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.    Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.    The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.    The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.    Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.    The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.    The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.    The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.    Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.    The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.    The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.    The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.    The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.    The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.    Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.    The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.    The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.    Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.    The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.    The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.    The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.    The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.    Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.    Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.    Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.    Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.    The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.    The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.    The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.    The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.    The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.    The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.    Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.    Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.    Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.    The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.    The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.    Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.    Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.    Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.    First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.    Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.    The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.    The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.    The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.    ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants #reading list,

   4 Psychology
   3 Occultism
   1 Philosophy


   3 Jordan Peterson
   2 Jorge Luis Borges
   2 Aleister Crowley


   3 Maps of Meaning
   2 Liber ABA

1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   choose to make ourselves. Practice, in the words of William James, may change   our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   fountainhead for everything and, similarly, the resting-place and destination point for all. William James   turned to poetry in his attempt to conceptualize this place:

1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Integral Yoga   An application of William James's notion of the pragmatic rule. Jung read James's Pragmatism in   1912, and it had a strong impact on his thinking. In his foreword to his Fordham University lectures, Jung stated that he had taken James's pragmatic rule as his guiding principle (CW 4, p.

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   absence of such training there can only be, in William Jamess phrase, a bloomin buzzin   confusion.399

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   As William James said: The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies   away without the sympathy of the community.552

1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism   Prof. William James wrote in his Variety of Religious   Experiences :

3.05 - The Formula of I.A.O., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Occultism   Professor William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience,   has well classified religions as the once-born and the twiceborn; but the religion now proclaimed in Liber Legis harmonizes

3.07 - The Formula of the Holy Grail, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Occultism   Formula of Osiris. Kin to them are the once-born of William James, who are   incapable of philosophy, magick, or even religion, but seek instinctively a refuge

3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various   Next day I inquired about her among the students. They said that she had been extraordinarily affected, and had cried several times after class. They were glad that she had talked to me, and that she now had something concrete to do. Here, I realized, was a remarkable event, a religious experience like some of those described by William James.36 I had experienced and described "The Religious Force of Unified Science" long before.11 Now I had seen it grip somebody else.   Within a few days this girl and her friends had collected, among the college's students, 250 signatures on a petition requesting of the college's Administration--instead of just modified sociology and anthropology courses--a completely new kind of course, Unified Science.

5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   like "presence." William James has given us a lively account   of this primordial phenomenon in his Varieties of Religious

Avatars of the Tortoise, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various   differing least from Zeno. William James (Some Problems of Philosophy,   1911, page 182) denies that fourteen minutes can pass, because first it is

Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Anonymous, #Various   Gustav Theodor Fechner (a man praised by William James   in his A Pluralistic Universe) rethought the preceding ideas

The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology   experience the dooming, buzzing confusion' of William James;   before reaching awareness the input is filtered, processed, distorted,   --   of consciousness', William James's 'fringe consciousness', and Myers's   'subliminal self'. In i860 Sir Thomas Laycock wrote that   --   image in the mind', wrote William James, 'is steeped and dyed in the   158   --   'The great field for new discoveries', wrote William James, 'is   always the unclassified residuum. Round about the accredited and   --   Erasmus Darwin unintentionally funny verse; as for William James, I   must confess that I find his style far more enjoyable than his brother   --   words of William James, is the new-born infant's world. Before it   can be more or less permanently stored, the input must be processed,

The One Who Walks Away, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various   (Variations on a theme by William James)   Reproduced from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters collection of short stories.