When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
Interpretation
New ideas often face skepticism, then indifference, and eventually acceptance as common knowledge.
This quote by William James highlights the typical trajectory of how people respond to new ideas or innovations. Initially met with doubt and disbelief, these concepts eventually gain recognition and acceptance, only for society to downplay their significance once they become mainstream. This reflects the human tendency to resist change and the gradual acknowledgment of the profound impact new ideas can have.
In practice
In a discussion about innovative technology, one might say, 'As William James noted, when a thing is new, people often dismiss it.'
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 greatest strength any human being an have is to recognize his or her own weaknesses. When you identify your weaknesses, you can begin to remedy them - or at least figure out how to work around them.
True salvation is freedom from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.
DON'T TAKE ANYTHING PERSONALLY. NOTHINGS OTHERS DO IS BECAUSE OF YOU. WHAT OTHERS SAY AND DO IS A PROJECTION OF THEIR OWN REALITY, THEIR OWN DREAM. WHEN YOU ARE IMMUNE TO THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS, YOU WON'T BE THE VICTIM OF NEEDLESS SUFFERING.
It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.
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