[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
Interpretation
The slight differences among individuals are crucial to understanding human nature.
This quote by William James emphasizes that while people may seem similar on the surface, the subtle differences that exist between individuals hold significant importance. These distinctions shape our identities, perspectives, and experiences, highlighting the value of individuality in a society that often overlooks personal uniqueness.
In practice
In a discussion about diversity, this quote can illustrate the significance of acknowledging individual traits.
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 Public ... demands certainties ... But there are not certainties
Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
The truly holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
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