No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
Interpretation
No matter how low someone may feel, there is always someone who looks up to or imitates them.
This quote by William James highlights the idea that every individual's actions and behaviors, regardless of their circumstances or perceived failures, make an impact on others. It reminds us that even those who feel they have hit rock bottom can influence someone else, serving as a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of human experience and the potential for everyone to serve as a role model, even in their most challenging moments.
In practice
In a discussion about resilience after failure, this quote can inspire others to recognize their influence.
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.
You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.
It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.
Where are they written?" "In the world around us. Merely be attentive to what happens in your life, and you will discover where, every moment of the day, He hides His words and His will. Seek to do as He asks: this alone is the reason you are in the world." "If I discover it, I'll write it on clay tablets." "Do so. But write them, above all, in your heart; there they can neither burned nor destroyed, and you will take them wherever you go.
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