Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
Interpretation
Truth is defined by the consistency of our ideas with reality, while falsity indicates a lack of such consistency.
In this quote, William James asserts that truth is not an intrinsic property but rather a reflection of how well our ideas correspond to reality. He contrasts truth with falsity, suggesting that a true idea aligns with the reality it represents, while a false idea does not. This perspective emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and the evaluation of our beliefs against the world as it exists.
In practice
In a classroom setting to discuss the nature of truth in philosophy.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
Moreover he saw a skull floating on the surface of the water and he said unto it: Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned.
Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, / The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young.
Spiritual principles do not change, but we do.
How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd.
We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again - and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.
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