The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
Interpretation
Emotions drive our actions, even if they don't always follow logic.
William James emphasizes the powerful influence of emotions on our behavior. While our feelings may not always align with rational thought, they compel us to act, highlighting the importance of understanding and managing our emotions in order to navigate life effectively.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might say, 'Remember that while emotions can sway our decisions, they also propel us to act on what we feel.'
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.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
But there are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
With regard to the learned professions, little need be observed; they truly form no distinct interest in society . . . [discussing the landed, merchant, and learned classes in legislative assembly]. Will not the man of the learned profession, who will feel a neutrality to the rivalships between the different branches of industry, be likely to prove an impartial arbiter between them, ready to promote either, so far as it shall appear to him conducive to the general interests of society?
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one.
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