Take it to the
James:
"
Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one
fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with
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. 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."
"
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."
"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."
"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular
moral forces
that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the
crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary
oozing of
water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s
pride, if you give them
time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed.
So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and
foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the
eternal forces of
truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till
history
comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. — You need take
no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite
unintelligible to anyone but myself."
"Wherever you are it is your own
friends who make your
world."
"Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad."
"
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."
"Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose."
"
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."
"
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in
nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.
Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher
than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which
the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows
himself to be found wanting."
"There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it."
"
The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the
interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in
short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The
gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined
intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls.
Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in
the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much
as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the
divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.
"
"The
war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The
military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our
ideals until better substitutes are offered than the
glory and
shame that come to
nations as well as to
individuals from the ups and downs of
politics and the vicissitudes of
trade."
"Alexander's career was
piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of
power and plunder, made
romantic by the
character of the
hero. There was no
rational purpose in it, and the
moment he
died his generals and governors attacked one another."
"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."
"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. "
"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."
"Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to
the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which
has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the
more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he
in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being
victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jill's magical
importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths
revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs
are among the wonders of creation,
are
worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the
rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and
we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining
her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as
manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted
with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do
not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of
eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who
knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it - so
importantly - is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth
in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient
blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would
any of
us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for
our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way."
"
If you say that this is absurd, 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 person know
more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and
its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding
up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
intrinsically absurd."
"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."
"Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes
and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon
the human core."
"The
union of the
mathematician with the
poet, fervor with measure,
passion with correctness, this surely is the
ideal."
"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!"
"
""
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."
"
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, 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
bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his
little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."
"
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."
"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." (Writing to his son, from the Yosemite Valley)
