Quote #53
Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.
More from William James
- Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in th…
- Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concret…
- There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker;…
- Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trance…
- It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resign…
- Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might ha…
- But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness…
- There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them w…