"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, - or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relations between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process. We all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology" Vol 1, 1890)
"The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"The aim of ‘science’ is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"[…] as the sciences have developed further, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1907)
"First [...] a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1907)
"The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. 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 verification. Its validity is the process of its validation." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1907)
"The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1907)
"Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1907)
"Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts." (William James, "A Pluralistic Universe", 1908)
"An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true." (William James, "The Social Value of the College-Bred - Memories and Studies", 1911)
"A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough." (William James, "Selected Papers on Philosophy", 1918)
"Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man." (William James, "Selected Papers on Philosophy", 1918)
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