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About this quote

What does it mean?
James argues that the real hell is the one we create for ourselves through bad habits in this life.
In plain terms
We make our own hell on earth by building bad habits, not in the afterlife.
What can you take from it?
Bad habits create personal hell.

Where it applies

  • Self improvement
  • Religious study
  • Addiction recovery

Putting it to work

  • Focus on habit change
  • Discuss moral consequences

Questions to consider

  • How much of pain do we create?
  • Can we fix our own hell?

Another view

This ignores the real suffering caused by external forces beyond control.

More from William James

  1. Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, d…

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  2. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we …

    Permalink to quote #18
  3. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

    Permalink to quote #15

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