William James Quotes

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

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.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

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

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

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

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.

The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.

The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.