Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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 know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
All of our life is but a mass of small habits – practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual – that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
Men’s activities are occupied into ways – in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world’s life.
From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association.
No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.