You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of utilizing words effectively to create practical value in our experiences.
William James suggests that every word carries intrinsic value that can be harnessed for practical use. By actively engaging with language in a meaningful way, we can enrich our experiences and apply what we learn in real-world contexts.
In practice
In a seminar on effective communication, this quote could illustrate how thoughtful language impacts understanding.
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.
Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Before you give advice, that is to say advice which you have not been asked to give, it is well to put to yourself two questions - namely, what is your motive for giving it, and what is it likely to be worth? If these questions were always asked, and honestly answered, there would be less advice given.
If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me.
The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
The strong grows in solitude where the weak withers away.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.