William James Quotes

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Nothing's ever real until it's real.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

I go with what I know and what I see, and I believe in reality.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

Truth is not a matter of argumentation and conviction; it is not the outcome of opinion.

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

I think science is real.

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

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

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

Facts do not constitute truth.

Our greatest illusion is disillusion. We imagine that we are disillusioned with life, when the truth is that we have not even begun to live.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.

The world divides into facts.

Reality is the completion of experience.

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.