Explore Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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

Language is a social art.

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

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.

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as 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.

For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

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

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

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.

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

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.

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.

Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

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

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

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

To be is to be the value of a variable.