We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Interpretation
Developing habits allows us to free our minds for more important thinking.
William James emphasizes the importance of automating useful habits in our daily lives. By turning actions into habits, we can conserve our mental energy and devote more of our cognitive resources to creative and higher-level thinking.
In practice
In a motivational speech about productivity, one could use this quote to encourage the audience to develop positive habits.
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 highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.
Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.
Adaptability is being able to adjust to any situation at any given time.
What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.
God finds us in the holes we dig for ourselves. We see failures; He sees foundations.
Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.