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.
Gaza is often described as 'the world's largest open air prison' because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons - they donβt have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.
Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
The harsh truth is that 'respectability' is the exorbitant tax we African Americans are forced to pay daily as we try to live out our versions of the American Dream.
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