If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that mere feelings don't define the quality of experience or decision-making; deeper reflection is necessary.
William James argues that if the validity of human experiences relied solely on the feelings they evoke, then states like drunkenness, which can be pleasurable, would be deemed the highest form of experience. However, he implies that true value in human experience comes from more than just fleeting sensations and feelings; it requires meaningful contemplation and understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of happiness during a philosophy class.
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.
When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays.
What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.
he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.
Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.
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