Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the interconnectedness of human lives despite physical separations.
William James metaphorically compares lives to islands and trees, emphasizing that while individuals may seem isolated on the surface, there is a deeper connection among them that binds them together. The 'whisper' of trees and the 'hanging together' of islands suggest that relationships and underlying ties play a crucial role in our existence, promoting a sense of unity and shared experience even when outwardly separated.
In practice
In a motivational speech about teamwork and collaboration, this quote could emphasize the importance of working together.
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.
Faith is a kind of knowing; it is different from hope. My faith is that life is purposeful; of that I'm sure. There is a God, there is intelligence, there is consciousness. And behind all of this, there is incredible compassion.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Truth is a remarkable thing. We cannot miss knowing some of it. But we cannot know it entirely.
I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.
Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.
We ask only to be reassured About the noises in the cellar And the window that should not have been open
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