The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
Category: William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to… Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.
Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.