In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
Interpretation
Forgetting can be as crucial as remembering, as it helps us to focus and make meaningful use of our intellect.
William James emphasizes that the act of forgetting is not merely a failure of memory but plays a vital role in how we process information and utilize our intellect. By letting go of less important details, we can better concentrate on what is essential, allowing for clearer thinking and better decision-making.
In practice
This quote could be used in a seminar about cognitive psychology to illustrate the value of selective memory.
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.
Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
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