A little thought in life is like salt upon rice.
"The
Undertakers", in
Kipling's
The Jungle Books
The great thing in all education is to make our
nervous system our ally instead of our
enemy.
William
James
Talks
to Teachers
If we can find those measures, whereby a rational
creature... may and ought to govern his opinions
and actions, we need not be troubled that some
other things escape our knowledge.
John
Locke
The greatest obstacle in science is not ignorance,
but the illusion of knowledge.
James
le Fanou
The trouble with intuition is, that to make it sound
reasonable, you have to overstate it.
John
Griffiths
Opposing one species of superstition to another,
set them quarreling while we ourselves, during their
fury
and contention, happily make our escape into
the calm though obscure regions of philosophy.
David
Hume
The
Natural History of Religion
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because
plumbing
is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness
in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity,
will have
neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.
John
W. Gardner
Genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows
no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth.
Ernest
Gellner
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize
till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand
Russell
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
"Desiderata",
a
poem by Max Ehrmann
For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it
as though it were something,
just as the only way one can
speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man,
which to be sure he was, in
a sense, for a time,
and as the only way one can speak of man, even our
anthropologists have realized that, is to
speak of him as
though he were a termite.
Watt
by
Samuel Beckett
After all, I have not wasted my time, I too have fidgeted
like anyone else, like anyone
else, in this aberrant
universe.
E.
M. Cioran
It will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know,
I'll never know, in the silence you don't
know, you must go on,
I can't go on, I'll go on.
The
Unnamable
by
Samuel Beckett
Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand
the concepts we have than constructing fictitious
ones.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein
Culture
and Value
It is very unhappy but too late to be helped,
the discovery we have made that we exist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Bad Faith, I am pretending to be two different people;
I am myself, but I am also another
person. Neither is
responsible for how I seem to have acted.
Jean-Paul
Sartre, as
paraphrased
by
George
Meyerson
In theory I reject this money. It is only in practice that
I accept it.
Peggy
Hill, in the TV show
"King
of the Hill"
Most of us go through life without knowing what it is
we want of it.
A
Coffin for Dimitrios,
a
novel by Eric Ambler
...all experimental reasonings are founded on the supposition,
that similar causes
prove similar effects, and similar effects
similar causes... But observe, I entreat you, with what extreme
caution all
just reasoners proceed in the transferring of
experiments to similar cases.
Philo,
in David Hume's
Dialogues
Concerning Natural
Religion
...the
beautiful many-voiced fugue of the human mind.
Douglas
Hofstadter
Godel,
Escher, Bach:
An
Eternal Golden Braid
Always strive to do your best -- but never on odd Tuesdays.
Richard
Rorty
Measurement is the making of distinctions, and the finer
the distinctions, the finer the measurement.
Enrico
Fermi
- You're just like Don Quixote. You think everything
is something else.
- Well, he had a point... If we never looked at things
and thought of what they might be, we'd all be still in
the tall grass with the apes.
They
Might Be Giants,
a
play by James Goldman
Aristotle was famous for knowing everything.
He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood
and is not involved in the process of thinking.
This is true only of certain persons.
Will
Cuppy
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing
that all others are jackasses.
H.
L. Mencken
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize
Pascal,
Pensees (1670), no. 430
A philosopher is a blind man
in a dark room
looking for a black cat
that isn't there.
Anonymous
The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen
and stupidity.
Frank
Zappa
Nothing is more profound than what appears on
the surface.
G. W.
F. Hegel
I actually have grown into the person I wanted to be.
Cary
Grant
Useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries,
rather than before.
John
C. Polanyi
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Anonymous
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Carl
Sagan
I will now let my claims for decent life stand as I have made them.
To sum them up in brief, they are: first, a healthy
body;
second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present
and the future; thirdly, occupation fit enough
for a healthy body
and an active mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in.
William
Morris
Signs
of Change
Accuracy is not the same thing as precision. Put one way,
accuracy is how close to right a value is, while precision
is how many decimal places it has. Put another, if the
local time is 12:02 PM, and someone tells you "It's about Noon,"
that statement has good accuracy but poor precision.
If they tell you "It's 7:53:02" then they are providing
great
precision but poor accuracy.
Joseph
T. Major
Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.
George
Santayana
The
Sense of Beauty
...there remained awake only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon,
who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed around,
and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear
the beginning of the discourse, and he was only half awake, but the
chief thing which he remembered was Socrates insisting to the other
two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and
that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also.
Plato,
The Symposium
Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express
a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas
is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you put
on canvas, the more you lose control of the thought.
Edward
Hopper
...Total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions
are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions
readjustments in the interior of the field... But the total field is so
underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there
is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate
in the light of any single contrary experience.
Willard
Van Orman Quine
"Two
Dogmas of Empiricism"
... I have kept to three fundamental principles:
- always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical,
the subjective from the objective;
- never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the
context of a proposition;
- never to lose sight of the distinction between concept and object.
... If the second principle is not observed, one is almost forced to
take as the meanings of words mental pictures or acts of the individual
mind, and so to offend against the first principle as well.
Gottlob
Frege
The
Foundations of Arithmetic
Anatomy classes dispel any notion that God works with a cookie
cutter. The idea they do create is that the mechanisms of life are
both subtler and more determined to proceed than most people
can imagine.
Hard
Landing,
a novel by Algis Budrys
Like the enigma of time for Augustine, the enigma of the continuum
arises because language misleads us into applying to it a picture
that doesn't fit.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein
Philosophical
Grammar
The accepted paradigm was, and still is, to find a good method for
doing the job, and then work on it until you've removed the last bug!
Sounds sensible, doesn't it? But eventually we had to conclude that
it's a basically wrong idea. After all, even if you did manage to
completely debug a program for some particular application, eventually
someone would want to use it for some other purpose, in a new
environment — and then new bugs would surely appear.
What, after all, does it mean for anything to work perfectly?
The very idea makes sense only in a rigid, unchanging,
completely
closed world, like the kinds that theorists make for themselves.
Marvin Minsky
If I dared to be a metaphysician, I think I would create a system
in which there were nothing but obligations.
Hilary
Putnam
Always run after someone who seeks the truth, and always run away from
someone who says he found it.
M.
Andre Gide
... Reason has only insight into that which it produces after a plan of its own.
Immanuel
Kant
He looks at the brain as having a language in which the activities of
the different parts of the brain have somehow to be interlocked and
made to match so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a
grand overall way of life -- what in the humanities we would call
a system of values.
Jacob
Bronowski on John Von Neumann
In man, Nature has constructed a being with a capacity for making promises.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James
Thurber
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations
which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred
North Whitehead
I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into
which it is woven, the "language game".
Ludwig
Wittgenstein
Philosophical
Investigations
