C. L. R. James Quotes

If I don't get at least 1 email in any given hour, I begin to think my friends are conspiring against me.

I'm imperfect. There are things in time that will bother me, but I don't dwell on them. It's another thing to dwell on it your whole day and let it bother you.

I just work. I'm doing shows, and I get love everywhere I go, so I would say I'm doing something right. I don't really sit here and dwell on it. I just do what I gotta do, and keep moving.

There are things in life that I enjoyed before music, so I'm just taking advantage of those things now that I can.

Always be patient. I also believe everything happens for a reason.

It is interesting to see how humans would act if they knew there were never any consequences for their actions because the next day they could wake up and just redo it.

I've been dancing forever; since I remember, that's what I've been doing.

Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

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.

Our beliefs are really rules for action.

There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.

We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.

All religions begin with the cry Help.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

We are mere bundles of habits.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.

Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.

[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.

The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.

An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true

The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.

Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.

Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections

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.

'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth

Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.