Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
Interpretation
Most of our daily actions are driven by habits rather than conscious thought.
William James highlights the extent to which our lives are governed by automatic behaviors and habits. He suggests that a significant portion of our daily activities, from morning to night, occurs without deliberate intention, pointing to the importance of understanding these habitual patterns in order to make meaningful changes in our lives.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-improvement, one might use this quote to emphasize the power of habits in shaping our lives.
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 Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.
I was always fascinated by people who are considered completely normal, because I find them the weirdest of all
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
Our country, if it does justice to itself, will be the workshop of liberty to the civilized world.
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