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.
Interpretation
Misinterpretations of truth are detrimental, especially in discussions with manipulative individuals.
William James highlights the dangers of communicating honest truths to those who distort or misunderstand them, suggesting that reasoned arguments and appeals to virtue are futile when faced with individuals who are inherently deceitful and manipulative. The metaphor of 'human crocodiles and boa-constrictors' illustrates the idea that some people are not open to genuine discourse, making rational engagement a wasted effort.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a debate about the nature of truth in politics.
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
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.
Hold everything earthly with a loose hand, but grasp eternal things with a death-like grip
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