The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the interdependence between individuals and the community, where both need each other to thrive.
William James emphasizes the vital relationship between the individual and the community, suggesting that a community cannot flourish without the active participation and initiative of its members. Conversely, individuals lose their motivation and drive without the support and understanding of the community around them, illustrating a symbiotic connection that is essential for growth and progress.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for greater community engagement in local projects.
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.
It is often the case, as all the saints know, that fellowship with the Father and the Son is most vivid and sweet, and Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.
We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of weekend dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens.
The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.