We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that every person has the potential for madness, and that societal norms may only cover deeper issues within us.
William James reflects on the intrinsic vulnerability of humanity, asserting that beneath the facade of sanity and morality lies the potential for madness. He indicates that our efforts to maintain moral standards may serve merely as superficial remedies, unable to heal the underlying existential void in our lives. This insight forces us to confront our human condition and the inherent struggles we face, reminding us that we are not so different from those society often marginalizes.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, this quote could highlight the shared struggles of all people.
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.
I'm never gonna die, never heard of death, energy can never be destroyed only the flesh, so when you try to murder me with bullets to the head this is why you can't kill me niggaz, I'm already dead.
Africa can and will only advance through African integration, which can be realized through the Federal United States of Africa
Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
I have known many meat eaters to be far more nonviolent than vegetarians.
The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.
If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.