What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the ongoing struggle between good and evil in life, highlighting the heroic efforts that emerge even in dire situations.
William James illustrates the fundamental conflict between light and darkness within life, suggesting that the essence of human experience is defined by this battle. He notes that while heroism often seems like a matter of chance, it is in those moments of despair that individuals manage to achieve extraordinary victories, symbolizing hope and resilience against the odds.
In practice
This quote can inspire someone facing challenges during a speech on resilience.
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.
The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
I think we all want to know that if our lives don't turn out the way we imagine, there's still a purpose.
No member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has canned peas, topped beets, hauled hay, shoveled coal, or helped in any way to serve others ever forgets or regrets the experience of helping provide for those in need.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
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