Pragmatism Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Pragmatism.
Top Quotes
“Utilitarianism”
“Anti-intellectualism”
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”
“The hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted.”
“Wikipedia: Pragmatism”
“The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.”
“The learning that now is hath the curse of barrenness, and is courtesan-like, for pleasure and not for fruit.”
“The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.”
“Le plus grand ennemi du bon, c'est le mieux.
• Variant: Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.”
“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?”
“Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.”
“Pragmatism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”
“That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of Wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results.”
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
“As the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue [philosophy] as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake.”
“The science, which teaches arts and handicrafts
Is merely science for the gaining of a living;
But the science which teaches deliverance from worldly existence,
Is not that the true science?”
“Pragmatism … reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.”
“Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be.”
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”