"The desire to gain wealth and the..." - Quote by William James
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
More by William James
“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”
“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”
“The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.”
More on Wealth
“Prosperity in the form of wealth works exactly the same as everything else. You will see it coming into your life when you are unattached to needing it.”
“You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy”
“Ninety-seven percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men, and what they do radiates all the way down into poor areas and cities around our country. Like predatory lending and misallocation of municipal services. These guys get municipal service, poor areas don't. So they run the economy into the ground, and who suffers the most? The poor pay more and they die earlier.”
More on Fear
“Courage is not the absence of fear — it s inspiring others to move beyond it.”
“So long as we fear the outside world, we must cease to think of Swaraj.”
“I think we need to teach children the importance of others, and that they cannot grow in this world without taking in others. The more worlds they take in, these unique worlds, the more they can become. We need to teach them to trust others again, because we're all frightened to death of each other. We're building higher and higher walls, stronger and stronger locks. Tear down the walls! Every day I see how we're distrusting and it hurts.”