We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
Interpretation
Humans often hold onto their lives even when they find them unbearable, highlighting a struggle with existence.
William James expresses the idea that people tend to cling to their lives despite the suffering or difficulties they endure. This reflects a deep existential dilemma where the fear of change or the unknown keeps individuals from letting go of situations that may no longer serve them, indicating a complex relationship with life and the human condition.
In practice
During a talk about resilience in difficult times, this quote can illustrate the human tendency to endure hardship.
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.
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.
Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
A fanatic commits to an ideal to whatever end. A fanatic throws everything aside to pursue their idea. Take something which it would be good to be committed to, like basic human rights. You might campaign for such a thing. You might spend every day of your life pursuing such a thing. But once you become fanatical about it, anything can happen.
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