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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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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
Universe
Unlovely
Sense
Offends
Many
Landscapes
Way
Aesthetic
Desert
Landscape
Taste
Ways
Overpopulated

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A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true.
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The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.
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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.
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The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
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Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.
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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.
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One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
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Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.
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The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
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Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
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To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.
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At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.
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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.
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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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I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.
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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.
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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.
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Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
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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