We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
Interpretation
People may seem isolated, but we are interconnected at a deeper level.
In this quote, William James uses the imagery of islands and trees to illustrate the apparent separateness of individuals. However, he emphasizes that beneath the surface, there is a profound connection akin to the intertwined roots of trees, suggesting that despite our physical and emotional isolation, we share an underlying bond that unites us in our human experience.
In practice
In a speech about community support during a local event.
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 very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.
That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
I'm more alarmed by people reacting violently to the violence in my films than I am by the violence in films.
The elimination of force at all costs is Utopian and the new movement which has arisen in the country and of whose dawn we have given a warning is inspired by the ideals which Guru Gobind Singh and Shivaji, Kamal Pasha and Reza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin preached.
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