Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Butler Yeats

I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Walter Scott

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.

Walter Scott

Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth, When thought is speech, and speech is truth.

William Kingdon Clifford

Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.

William Safire

Never assume the obvious is true.

William S. Burroughs

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Vincent D'Onofrio

The search for the truth is not for the faint-hearted.

William Wordsworth

To be a Prodigal's favourite,-then, worse truth, A Miser's pensioner,-behold our lot!

William Wordsworth

Truth takes no account of centuries.

William James

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

William James

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

William James

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?

William James

Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

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