William James Truth Quotations

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function.

True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections

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

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

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.

Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs

To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction

To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it

Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one

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

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

Truth is something that happens to an idea.

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.

Truth happens to an idea

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.