Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

“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, ...”

“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 ...”

“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 o...”

“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 i...”

“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...”

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

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

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

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

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