81 Quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine

How many possible men are there in that doorway?

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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