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.
Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
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.
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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.
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.
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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.
History is a bath of blood.
Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
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.
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.
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.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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.
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!.
Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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