Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
Interpretation
The quote encourages persistence and effort beyond initial attempts to achieve greater results.
William James emphasizes the importance of perseverance in the pursuit of goals. Many people give up after their first effort, not realizing that success may require pushing through initial challenges to discover untapped potential and resilience that lies within them. The idea is that true achievement often comes from going beyond our first limitations and exploring what we are truly capable of.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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.
We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.
Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down
Remember, if you do the things you ought to do when you ought to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them…Whatever you do or dream you can do—begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.
Life gives no one immunity against adversity, but life gives to everyone the power of positive thought which is sufficient to master all circumstances of adversity and convert them into benefits.
And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
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