No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
Interpretation
No matter how low someone may feel, there is always someone who looks up to or imitates them.
This quote by William James highlights the idea that every individual's actions and behaviors, regardless of their circumstances or perceived failures, make an impact on others. It reminds us that even those who feel they have hit rock bottom can influence someone else, serving as a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of human experience and the potential for everyone to serve as a role model, even in their most challenging moments.
In practice
In a discussion about resilience after failure, this quote can inspire others to recognize their influence.
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.
Order - Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
The sage acts without taking credit. He accomplishes without dwelling on it. He does not want to display his worth.
...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.
I'm probably my biggest critic. I worry that if you spend any quality time reveling in good things then karma will slap you upside the head, so I try to stay as even keel as I'm able.
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.