William James cytaty

strona 6

„Zaakceptujcie fakty. Zróbcie to, ponieważ akceptacja tego, co się wydarzyło, jest pierwszym krokiem do sprostania ich konsekwencjom.”

„Tak naprawdę, geniusz oznacza mniej więcej zdolność do postrzegania w niewyuczony sposób.”

„Owoce religii psują się przez krańcowość.”

„Również ludzie o nastawieniu empirycznym, kiedy formułują hipotezy kierujące ich życiem, często popadają w dogmatyzm jak nieomylni papieże.”

„Wielu ludziom wydaje się, że myślą, podczas gdy zmieniają się tylko przesądy.”

„(…) władzę, jaką alkohol rozciągnął nad ludzkością, niezaprzeczenie zawdzięcza on swej sile rozbudzania mistycznych właściwości natury ludzkiej, zazwyczaj dławionych przez suche fakty i suchy krytycyzm chwil trzeźwości.”

„Jedynie dążenie do odkupionej duchowej natury, do bezgrzeszności, czy to na tym świecie, czy po śmierci, można uznać za czyste i nieskazitelne duchowe poszukiwanie samego siebie.”

„Pani, nie mogę się zgodzić, by Pani ignorancja, jakkolwiek zupełna, brała górę nad moją jakże skromną wiedzą”

„Tym, co myśli, są same myśli.”

„Różnica między człowiekiem dobrym a złym polega na motywie działania.”

„Nie wolno kłamać w ogóle, wolno jednak kłamać ile dusza zapragnie, gdy odpowiada się na pytania o stosunki z damą (…)”

„Miarą prawdy jest dolar.”

„Największe odkrycie moich czasów to prawda, że człowiek może zmienić siebie, zmieniając swój stosunek do świata.”

„Wciąż jednak bardzo mało mówi się o powodach, dla których modlimy się, a które są takie po prostu takie, że nie potrafimy się nie modlić.”

„Św. Teresa (z Avili) mogłaby posiadać układ nerwowy najspokojniejszej krowy i nie uratowałaby przez to swojej teologii, jeśli przyłożenie do tej teologii innych sprawdzianów wypadłoby dla niej niepomyślnie.”

„Nasza idea pary nie jest parą idei.”

„(…) „wątroba” w równym stopniu wpływa na orzeczenia najbardziej zatwardziałego ateisty, jak na zaniepokojonego o swoją duszę metodystę.”

„O św. Ludwiku Gonzadze: gdy intelekt nie jest większy niż łepek szpilki i żywi w sobie stosownie drobne pojęcie Boga, rezultatem tego, pomimo całego włożonego w to bohaterstwa, może być jedynie coś całkiem odrażającego.”

„Nie ma złej pogody. Jest tylko nieodpowiednia odzież.”

„O czymkolwiek myślę, zawsze jednocześnie, mniej lub bardziej uświadamiam sobie samego siebie, istnienie własnej osoby. Zarazem to ja je sobie uświadamiam, tak że w całym moim „ja”, niejako podwójnym, częściowo poznawanym, a częściowo poznającym, będącym po części przedmiotem, a po części podmiotem, wyodrębnić należy dwa aspekty, z których jeden możemy w skrócie nazwać „ja” przedmiotowym (ang. me), a drugie – „ja” podmiotowym”

„Pewien mój znajomy, który jest prostym stolarzem, powiedział mi: Między poszczególnymi ludźmi są naprawdę małe różnice, jednak te małe różnice są bardzo ważne. W tym rozróżnieniu tkwi istota rzeczy. Znaczenie indywidualności.”

„Zamiast chleba otrzymaliśmy kamień, a zamiast ryby węża. Gdy ten konglomerat abstrakcyjnych pojęć stawał się namiastką wiedzy o bogu, szkoły teologiczne mogły rozkwitać, lecz żywa religia znikała ze świata. Religia rozwija się nie dzięki abstrakcyjnym definicjom i systemom logicznie powiązanych właściwości, nie dzięki szkołom teologicznym i ich profesorom. Wszystko to jest wtórną naroślą na konkretnym doświadczeniu religijnym, na uczuciu i dążeniu do odnowy, pojawiającym się w życiu poszczególnych ludzi.”

„(…) świadoma jaźń jest dalszym ciągiem bez miary obszerniejszej nieświadomej, ujawniającej się w zbawczych doświadczeniach religijnych… których treść… nie jest złudzeniem, lecz prawdą obiektywną.”

“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

“The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”

“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions…. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”

“The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”

“Quoting an unnamed writer: "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do," I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or… to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter?… Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."”

“But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.”

“What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?…It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.”

“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”

“The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. 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. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! … Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.”

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

“A thing is important if anyone think it important.”

“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”

“Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

“We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. … You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.”

“I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.”

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”

“Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.”

“Freedom is only necessity understood.”

“The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”

“The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.”

“Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.”

“Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?”

“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”

“Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.”