William James Quotes

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

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

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

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

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

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

The thing about the truth is that it exists outside of belief. Even if nobody believes it, that thing is still true.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

Perception and reality are two different things.

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

I think science is real.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

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.

Fact and fiction are different truths.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

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

Facts do not constitute truth.

All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.

"Comfort" is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being "comfortable".

First, what does truth require? It requires us to face the facts as they are, not to involve ourselves in self-deception; to refuse to think merely in slogans. If we are to work for the future of the city, let us deal with the realities as they actually are, not as they might have been, and not as we wish they were.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.