Quote

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.

Willard Van Orman Quine

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Willard Van Orman Quine
Age: 92 †
Born: 1908
Born: June 25
Died: 2000
Died: December 25
Analytic Philosopher
Epistemologist
Linguist
Logician
Mathematician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Language
Philosopher Of Science
Professor
Akron
Ohio
W. V. Quine
Life
Urge
Urges
Waste
Least
Burgeoning
Feel
Murky
Feels
Quickening
Make
Primordial
Time
Wastes

More quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula To be is to be the value of a variable this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
Willard Van Orman Quine