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.
Interpretation
Appreciating others fosters goodwill and transforms the giver.
This quote emphasizes the importance of showing appreciation to others, suggesting that such positive recognition not only builds stronger relationships but also leads to personal growth in the one who gives appreciation. William James highlights how the act of appreciating others can lead to a more meaningful and positive self-transformation, creating a ripple effect of goodwill in interpersonal interactions.
In practice
In a team meeting to boost morale and encourage collaboration, one might say, 'As William James said, if you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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.
Justice is the crowning glory of the virtues.
Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
When people do not dread authorities, then a greater dread descends.
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.
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