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To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Plenty
Accusation
Theory
Hangs
Truth
Choke
Give
Tactics
Better
Rope
Self
Contradiction
Giving
Abstract
Accusations
Eventually
Outset

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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
William James
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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James