dots-menu
×

Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  William James (1842–1910)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1837
AUTHOR: William James (1842–1910)
QUOTATION: 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.
ATTRIBUTION: WILLIAM JAMES, “What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931). Lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, December 1906, and at Columbia University, New York City, January 1907.
SUBJECTS: Truth