All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
Interpretation
Daily routines are often performed without conscious thought about pleasure or pain.
William James suggests that much of our daily activities are carried out on autopilot, devoid of deeper reflection on their emotional impact. We engage in these routines not with a focus on enjoyment or suffering, but rather as necessary actions of our lives, occasionally interrupted by moments of awareness regarding their significance.
In practice
In a discussion about mindfulness, one could refer to this quote to emphasize the importance of being present.
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.
How we treat the vulnerable is how we define ourselves as a species.
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.
A riot is the language of the unheard. On blacks in America; address at Birmingham AL
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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