Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
More Quotes from William James:
When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.William James
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it ...
William James
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.
William James
Truth is what works.
William James
If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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Based on Topics: Children Quotes, Fate & Destiny Quotes, Habit Quotes, Society & Civilization QuotesBased on Keywords: fly-wheel, uprisings
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