William James Facts Quotations

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.

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

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

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.

Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.