Famous Quotes & Sayings

William James

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

William James

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

William James

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

William James

Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one

William James

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it

William James

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

William James

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock

William James

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

William James

To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

William James

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

The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs

William James

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

William James

In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common

William James

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

William James

Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'

William James

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

William James

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

William James

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system

William James

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

William James

True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience

William James

The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function.

William James

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

William James

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

William James

Truth happens to an idea

William James

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

William James

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

William James

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

William Gilmore Simms

Have I done anything for society? I have then done more for myself. Let that question and truth be always present to thy mind, and work without cessation.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Half-truths are the devil's IOUs.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

nothing good ever comes out of denying the truth about our situation.

William Faulkner

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

William Faulkner

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.