William James Quotes

Theory is continually the precursor of truth; we must pass through the twilight and its shade, to arrive at the full and perfect day.

Science is not wisdom.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

I don’t think anything about Einstein’s theory because I don’t understand it.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Without a theory the facts are silent.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Without theory, there are no questions.

There is no single truth, but each of the scholarly disciplines has methods which lead one ever closer to the truth.

In the search for truth - that everything in nature seems to hide - man needs the assistance of all his faculties. All the senses should be awake.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

There is no dogma, there isn't anything about how the universe works.

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.