Quote

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

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Within
Enormous
Agent
Uprising
Poor
Conservative
Wheels
Tread
Society
Thus
Agents
Therein
Science
Fortune
Precious
Deserted
Children
Brought
Bounds
Prevents
Uprisings
Life
Habit
Envy
Envious
Ordinance
Walks
Keeps
Saves
Repulsive
Alone
Hardest
Wheel
Ordinances

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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.
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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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.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
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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.
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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.
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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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.
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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
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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.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
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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