There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
Interpretation
Joy and tenderness often come together, especially in a life of virtue.
In this quote, William James highlights the natural connection between joy and tenderness, suggesting that these qualities coexist harmoniously in the lives of virtuous individuals. This companionship is a reflection of the deeper emotional and spiritual affinities that guide a saintly life, indicating that true joy is often rooted in compassion and caring for others.
In practice
In a motivational speech about living a fulfilling life, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of joy and compassion.
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.
One of the things I miss most is that I can no longer read, due to age-related macular degeneration. I get regular injections for this, and thankfully these seem to have arrested its progress, but it's still very difficult for me to read. That means it is hard for me to pick up my Bible and read it like I used to, and I miss that very much.
In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.
We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.
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