We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
Interpretation
People may seem isolated, but we are interconnected at a deeper level.
In this quote, William James uses the imagery of islands and trees to illustrate the apparent separateness of individuals. However, he emphasizes that beneath the surface, there is a profound connection akin to the intertwined roots of trees, suggesting that despite our physical and emotional isolation, we share an underlying bond that unites us in our human experience.
In practice
In a speech about community support during a local event.
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 most important thing to me is, how, in the process of learning how to use my body, can I come to understand myself ?
In war, the truth must be guarded by a body guard of lies.
I suffer from life and from other people. I canβt look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful β only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
Meaning equals emotion and emotion equals life. Choose consciously and wisely.
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.
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