The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
Interpretation
Emotions drive our actions, even if they don't always follow logic.
William James emphasizes the powerful influence of emotions on our behavior. While our feelings may not always align with rational thought, they compel us to act, highlighting the importance of understanding and managing our emotions in order to navigate life effectively.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might say, 'Remember that while emotions can sway our decisions, they also propel us to act on what we feel.'
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.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Diabolical error decks itself out with ease in lying colors with some appearance of truth, so that the force of pronouncement is corrupted by a very brief addition or change, and the confession of faith which should have resulted in salvation, by a subtle transition leads to death!
The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.
Let freedom ka-ching...Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?
Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.
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