William James citáty

strana 8

„Nejhlubším principem lidské povahy je touha být oceněn.“

„Nejhlubší podstatou lidské přirozenosti je potřeba být uznáván.“

„Chcete-li změnit svůj život, začněte s tím okamžitě a razantně, bez výjimek.“

„Největším objevem naší generace je, že lidé mohou změnit svůj život změnou svého duševního postoje. Jak myslíte, takoví budete.“

„Chovejte se tak, jako by to, co děláte, mělo význam. Protože má.“

„Největším objevem v mém životě je zjištění, že lidé mohou změnit své vnější životy změnou vnitřního myšlení.“

„Život využijeme nejlépe tehdy, když ho věnujeme něčemu, co trvá déle než život sám.“

„Největším objevem mé generace je skutečnost, že lidská bytost může svůj život pozměnit tím, že k němu změní přístup.“

„Nejdůležitější v životě je žít pro něco více, než jen vlastní život.“

„Většina lidí nikdy neběží na první dech dostatečně daleko, aby zjistili, že mají dech druhý. Udělejte pro své sny všechno, co můžete, a budete překvapeni, kolik v sobě máte energie.“

„Běžný člověk rozvine jen deset procent svých latentních možností.“

„Optimismus je cesta k moci.“

„Jsme jako ostrovy v moři, na povrchu oddělené, ale spojené v hlubinách“

„Nejlepší zbraní proti stresu je naše schopnost dát jedné myšlence přednost před jinou.“

„Nic neunavuje tak, jako věčné čekání na dokončení úkolu.“

„Genialita vlastně není nic jiného, než schopnost chápat věci neobvyklým způsobem.“

„Za nejextrémnější únavou a vyčerpáním můžeme nalézt spoustu lehkosti a síly, o kterých se nám nikdy ani nezdálo. K těmto zdrojům síly jsme se nikdy nepropracovali, protože jsme se nedostali přes překážky.“

„Skepticismus v mravních záležitostech je mocným spojencem nemravnosti.“

„Pluralismus nechává věci skutečně existovat v jednotlivé formě anebo individuálně. Monismus považuje formu všeho druhu anebo formu shromážděných jednotek za jedinou formu, která je racionální.“

“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

“A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

“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.”

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.”

“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”

“The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.”

“The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance…This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.”

“Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.”

“History is a bath of blood.”

“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.”

“I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.”

“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.”

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

“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.”

“Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.”

“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.”

“The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.”

“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The power to move the world is in the subconscious mind. ”

“Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives … It is too bad that most people will not accept this tremendous discovery and begin living it.”

“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.”

“There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience... that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.”