Sick Souls, Healthy Minds Quotes

“Acting as if the world is a welcoming and tender place occasionally has the effect of making it more so.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“My first act of free will,” he asserted, “shall be to believe in free will.”10 With these words, James was reborn and his life gradually—in fits and starts—transformed.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“The art of being wise,” James suggested, “was knowing what to overlook”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Goethe was right—“Boldness has magic.” And the magic of human activity is not just in its ability to change our circumstances, to transform the surroundings in which we live. No small part of the magic has to do with the way that activity can radically alter the emotional landscape of our inner lives.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Falling in love and believing in free will are not all that different. Both are radical, life-altering, working hypotheses, verified or disproved in experience. Both involve the type of belief that one must assent to in an initial act of (basically blind) faith.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“a committed humanist, one who holds that the meaning of life is up to the liver.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“We have to live today by the truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. —William James, “The Conception of Truth,” 1907”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Do my actions have the feeling of the ‘real me,’ or am I just half-asleep, play acting at the only life I have?”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”17 The action itself is enough to bring about a particular affective state.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Henceforth, philosophy, and Harvard’s psychology laboratory, would have their own building on campus, separated off from the other academic disciplines. Departments and intellectual canons would grow independently, never the twain to meet again. As philosophy grew more insular in the twentieth century, it would jeopardize its own significance. James predicted this and, I suspect, saw Emerson Hall as a sign of the prophecy’s fulfillment. So James didn’t exactly care for Emerson’s construction,”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“The place just looked dead. No zest at all. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible. As he did, however, James had a thought that gave him pause, one that has often slowed me down in the frantic pursuit of my own zestful experiences. Is it not possible, even quite likely, that the men and women who live here, their children and their pets, all live lives that strive after similar moments of meaning? Is it not possible, that they long for and find zest in their surroundings in precisely the way that I do? Yes, it is possible. Now let’s be careful here. James wasn’t saying that the strangers whom we see through a glass darkly have the same experiences that we do, that we should project our own wants and desires on the people we pass on the street or in the market. He was precisely not saying this. He is suggesting that individuals tap meaning—and experience zest—in singularly unique ways. In other words, we are the same precisely because there is an irreducible difference between the zests that make our worlds meaningful. And, at the same time, the disappointment and tragedy of zest-unrealized or zest-extinguished is a similar feeling of utter alienation and loneliness. We feel ourselves apart in the same way.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“[S]ensations are the motherearth, the anchorage, the stable rock,”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“In James’s words, “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“My religious friend was secure in her faith, but what had she relinquished in exchange for that? James suspected that the “rationalistic” impulse to create a model of the universe that was completely tidy, logically consistent, and divinely governed could only be satisfied if one were also willing to lose touch with reality.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“He wanted to craft a philosophy that was absolutely honest to the twisted, often contradictory, facts of life, but also to the desire that many of us have to transcend them. In his words, he wanted to provide a way of thinking between the “tough-minded” scientist and the “tender-minded” idealist, preserving what is valuable about both sides.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“What is often overlooked, however, is that pragmatism is also an existential and normative stance regarding the relationship between truth and human meaning.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“There is a crack in everything,” wrote Leonard Cohen, “that is where the light gets in.” And it gets in where you least expect it.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Wonder—from the Old English wundor, meaning “a marvelous thing, a miracle, an object of great astonishment.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Colin McGinn wrote a paper in the journal Mind entitled “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” McGinn concludes in the negative. Consciousness is “a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel,” and he argues that there is an insurmountable methodological obstacle: the objective method of science can only go so far in explaining the subjective experience of human beings. The felt “inside” of consciousness is something that scientific observations could never examine.4”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“The experience of losing Herman gave James “the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness of this thing called existence.”2 He couldn’t will himself out of this situation. He couldn’t habituate himself to this reality. Instead, James would go deeper into the mysteriousness of existence in order to see if it could be anything other than intolerable. His investigations of consciousness revealed that it could.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“This other colleague invited me to a yoga class. I was not, in any way, shape, or form, a yogi. I was, if anything at that point, a gym rat, and gym rats don’t bend or twist easily. I didn’t want to go, but I did, remembering James’s words that I would “cold-bloodedly” have to go through the motions of being happier in order to actually become so.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Instead they were merely observing that one rarely has all the facts beforehand and, in many instances, one must act and commit well before the verdict is in. “Just do it.” But realize that things might not go well. This isn’t the same thing as fixating on your potential failure—which is what I am wont to do—which will invariably stifle your chances altogether.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“One has to act before one really knows the answer. Goethe, one of James’s literary heroes, puts it best: “What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”22 Looking back on his initial meeting with Alice, James urges us to “begin it,” to exercise our will in the face of uncertainty,”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. —William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 1906”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“In other words, everything can be stripped from a person except his or her free response to the horrible situation into which he or she has been thrown.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Chronic illness, physical and psychological, is not unlike the sea. Seemingly limitless and unpredictable, completely indifferent to human plans and desires, there is little hope of counteracting it. And it takes a person down. Once under water, the very attempt to stay alive—the act of inhaling—hastens one’s rapid demise. If James learned something on Agassiz’s expedition, it was that human life, despite our best attempts to transcend our natural circumstance or brute animality, is governed, almost exclusively, by physical forces beyond our understanding and control.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“If James learned something on Agassiz’s expedition, it was that human life, despite our best attempts to transcend our natural circumstance or brute animality, is governed, almost exclusively, by physical forces beyond our understanding and control.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Schopenhauer suspected that in the absence of genuine hardship some individuals would fabricate it—they would pointedly seek out danger and discomfort—for no other reason than to escape ennui. James was one of them.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life