Pragmatism Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Climb to the summits not to defeat the mountains but to ease their lonelinesses! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented. — Josiah Royce

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence. — John Dewey

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves. — Richard M. Rorty

Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking. — John Dewey

Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course. — Max Horkheimer

All of the members of my new team have displayed in their work a strong sense of pragmatism that I promote ... While the backgrounds of principal officials are diverse, they all share a common commitment to our country, our territory and our people and agree with my governing philosophy. — Donald Tsang

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. — William James

I'm just sick of the way things are. We're in an age in which we can't live without accepting the logic of the market. Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy ... What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us. — Jose Mujica

There's a cyclical nature to what people like in the world. Through time, things come around again. — James Bobin

Life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle - — Charles Bukowski

We make versions, and true versions make worlds. — Nelson Goodman

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences. — Bryan M. Litfin

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms? — William James

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater - perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now. — David Remnick

I don't want to give advice to a 19-year-old, because I want a 19-year-old to make mistakes and learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes. Just make sure they're your mistakes. — Fiona Apple

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night? — Graham Greene

Design is not for philosophy it's for life. — Issey Miyake

The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. — William James

My sense, although I don't remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg's eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 — Grace Lee Boggs

Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. — John Dewey