Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
Interpretation
Habits streamline our actions, enhance precision, and reduce effort.
This quote by William James highlights the importance of habits in our daily lives. By establishing good habits, we can perform tasks more efficiently and with less mental and physical strain, allowing us to focus our energy on more significant endeavors and reducing overall fatigue.
In practice
In a motivational speech about productivity, one might say this quote to emphasize the power of developing good habits.
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.
Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
Men who never get carried away should be.
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.
The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.
If we don't plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don't have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don't have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.
Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them.
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