Quotes from William James

Truth is something that happens to an idea.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.

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

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 for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

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

Truth happens to an idea

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

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

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

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

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

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

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

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

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

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

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