"Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.""
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Truth quotes
Truth
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Truth quotes (page 62 of 158)
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"My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known."
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"... 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."
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"An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true"
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"Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results."
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"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."
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"'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth"
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"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"
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"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"
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"To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides"
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"Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences"
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"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"
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"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot"
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"To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein"
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"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"
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"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"
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"As there comes light from heaven and words from breath, As there is sense in truth and truth in virtue"
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"O, while you live, tell truth, and shame the Devil!"
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"Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth, And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out."
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"I am as true as truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of truth."
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