Quote

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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Moments
Hypothesis
Firsts
Throw
First
Creativity
Willing
Moment
Experience
Contradicts
Away
Hypotheses
Next
Fertile

More quotes by William James

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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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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.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
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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.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
William James