Willard Van Orman Quine

“Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll.”

“Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”

“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”

“Language is a social art.”

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”

“One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.”

“Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.”

“It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

“'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.”

“It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.”

“We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.”

“No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”

“Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.”

“Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.”

“Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.”

“Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.”

“Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.”

“The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.”

“Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.”

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”