James Harvey Robinson Quotes

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.

People get so attached to a position which they identify themselves with that they just spurt it out, but they can't really give you a viable reason why they feel that way.

People fall in love with their identity with their own position and are often reluctant to leave.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.

Took the G out yo waffle, all you got left is your ego.

Preconceived ideas are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature. They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas-this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed on the threshold of all the temples of science: 'The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.'

What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.

When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

The idea was that the record itself ['The Bones Of What You Believe' ] is a kind of labour of love for us - all our energy and all our passion and all the stuff we believed in is in that record, so you're kind of handing that off to other people, if that makes sense.

An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it's more available to you.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.

Perhaps the greatest mistake we can make, which causes loss of self-respect, is making the opinions of others more important than our own opinion of ourselves. You'll find no shortage of opinions directed at you. If you allow them to undermine your self-respect, you're seeking the respect of others over your own, and you're abdicating yourself.