81 Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

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.

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

Language is a social art.

Nonsense is indeed mere absence of sense, and can always be remedied by arbitrarily assigning some sense.

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.

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

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.

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements.