Quotes About Pragmatism

Rationality is the way to lead life. So high time, let's stop feeding our dreams and shake hands with the reality.

Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of the truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can't answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.

John Hay on Lincoln: "He always worked with things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire to make them better.

True leadership is all about being verbally and attitudinally positive or active, humble, compassionate, passionate, foresighted, pragmatic and proactive simultaneously. Yes! that is it and that is that. ~Emeasoba George

We would do well to remember that the great pragmatist William James dedicated his extraordinarily wide-ranging Varieties of Religious Experience to none other than John Stuart Mill.

The cold harsh reality is that we have to balance the budget.

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul.

I've always been that way where, if something doesn't work out the first time, I won't try to beat a dead horse.

I've made a professional reputation playing working-class, middle-class, American women. There's a real sense of stoicism and pragmatism and strength and lyricism of a woman like that.

We've got to understand what wins and what loses for us. What's our formula? For us, it might not be flashy. It might be boring football, but it works for us.

I don't take on a fight just for a fight. I don't tilt at windmills.

Business is not a spiritual matter, and my business decisions are not based on spiritual considerations. When I founded the Essence of Life, a project aimed at teaching tolerance and respectful dialogue, the person appointed to head it was Irit Atzmon, a former colonel in the army. Can anything be more down-to-earth than that?

In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.

The standards of judgement must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

We must take things as we find them in this world.

Marianne had learned to live by her wits, and she took a severe and cynical view of the world.

No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle

For pragmatist philosophers such as these, a belief is valued as true because it is useful, because it works, because it brings tangible benefits to human beings and other creatures. Siddhattha Gotama's Four Noble Truths are "true" not because they correspond to something real somewhere, but because, when put into practice, they can enhance the quality of your life. In

Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe i? This pragmatism is evident in many of the classic parables: the poisoned arrow, the city, the raft—as well as in the Buddha's presentation of the four noble truths as a range of tasks to be performed rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed.

Of them all, he had been the most perfectly made, a man whose deeply romantic core was encased in a brutally simple box which consisted of instinct and pragmatism.

Love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.

I don't believe in love at first sight. I think it's a grave mistake.

Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.

Taken on its own terms, pragmatism's folly is that it separates intelligence from wisdom. Its greatest sins are arrogance and deceit, including self-deceit. It is arrogant because it assumes the individual—particularly the expert—can know everything he needs to know without reference to received wisdom