William James Quotes

There is no sense in making statements that will not continue to be true after they are made.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

It might not be true, but that doesn't mean it's nonsense.

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

He, who knows how to distinguish between true and false, must have an adequate idea of true and false.

I'm always the "less is more" guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one who will keep it grounded. Even if I let it go off and go crazy, I'm still the voice of keeping things grounded in reality.

What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

A lie stands on one leg, truth on two.

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

I grew up with the idea that once you found yourself with your clothes, why change?

If it doesn't make sense, it's usually not true.

Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.

Emotions change. Truth doesn't. What will you build your life upon?

Accuracy builds credibility.

The orator is thereby an orator that keeps his feet ever on a fact.

The truth always stays the same.

You have to look life straight in the eye. De-mystify your world. Can you really afford to believe magic is for real? Not when time is concerned.

If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.

The heavens and earth stay as they were; my heart Beats as it beat: the truth remains the truth.

Historically, I've done movies, but I've got a family already. I've been doing this for many years, and the idea of working consistently on something that I really, really love, and the steadiness of it, was really appealing.

Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Logic is the art of convincing us some truth.