Practical Truth Quotes

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

Reflection is only a partial understanding of truth if it does not translate itself in practice into commitments to the common good and justice. Truth is not mere abstraction but something to be done and is only apprehended when this is realized.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

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.

Our perceptions of truth are built around what is practical, not what is true. Even the smartest human brain doesn't have the capacity for discerning true facts. That's why so many of us settle for scientific facts. It's the best we can do.

On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.

Truth is of no practical value to mankind save as it affects terrestrial phenomena, hence the discoveries of science should be concealed or glossed over wherever they conflict with orthodoxy.

That's the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way - going out and doing them. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it's the truth about the world.

Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.

The doctrines of the Bible are often not clothed in the language of strict truth, but in that which was fittest to convey to a rude and ignorant people the practical essentials of the doctrine.

For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her.

When one is able to overcome the romantic and emotional attitude, one discovers truth even in the kitchen sink.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.

I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.