Fact

“Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere observes, are very stubborn things.”

“But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.”

“What could I do! Facts are such horrid things!”

“I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.”

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

“After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies — damned lies — and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of. So we may be led to the serious consideration of change by the evolution of materials of conviction which those who run may read, though some who read may wish to run away from them.”

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

“The fatal futility of Fact.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask him the number of steps.”

“The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.”

“Fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

“I often wish … that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.”

“Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.”

“Never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven.”

“We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory.”

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

“I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”

“I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.”

“Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.”

“Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.”

“Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed”

“Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them.”

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind.”

“The power of administrative bodies to make finding of fact which may be treated as conclusive, if there is evidence both ways, is a power of enormous consequence. An unscrupulous administrator might be tempted to say "Let me find the facts for the people of my country, and I care little who lays down the general principles."”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes."”

“Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.”

“Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.”

“Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.”

“We are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.”

“A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.”

“Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning”

“When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.”

“A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.”

“Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill...”

“There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.”

“1 The world is all that is the case. 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.”

“We can define a fact as an observation backed up by such a preponderance of evidence that no useful purpose would be served by doubting it.”

“People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.”

“The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.”

“Besides being assailed by epistemologists, the world of facts has been undermined in recent times by developments within the theory of meaning. The cardinal assumption of positivistic philosophies of language was that all meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meanings of sentences must be given by the method of verifying the assertions contained in them.”