— arhiva de citate
Fragmente ridicate din carte și așezate în ordinea apariției lor — sediment de gândire, nu colecție.
19 fragmente · marginalia indică pagina
- 001
„The process of sound philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.”
- 002
„You should set to work to doubt things and retain only what you cannot doubt because of its clearness and distinctness, not because you are sure not to be induced into error, for there does not exist a method which will safeguard you against the possibility of error. The wish for perfect security is one of those snares we are always falling into, and is just as untenable in the realm of knowledge as in everything else.”
- 003
„When we speak falsely it is an objective fact that makes what we say false, and it is an objective fact which makes what we say true when we speak truly.”
- 004
„For each fact there are two propositions, one true and one false, and there is nothing in the nature of the symbol to show us which is the true one and which is the false one.”
- 005
„The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
- 006
„All analysis is only possible in regard to what is complex, and it always depends, in the last analysis, upon direct acquaintance with the objects which are the meanings of certain simple symbols.”
- 007
„It would be altogether incredibly inconvenient to have an unambiguous language, and therefore mercifully we have not got one.”
- 008
„In a logically perfect language the words in a proposition would correspond one by one with the components of the corresponding fact, with the exception of such words as „or”, „not”, „if”, „then”, which have a different function.”
- 009
„People speak of „understanding the universe” and so on. But, of course, the only thing you can really understand (in the strict sense of the word) is a symbol, and to understand a symbol is to know what it stands for.”
- 010
„Wherever it is facts alone that are involved, error is impossible.”
- 011
„It is merely an accident, so to speak, that there is a universe.”
- 012
„The physical world is a sort of governing aristocracy, which has somehow managed to cause everything else to be treated with disrespect. That sort of attitude is unworthy of a philosopher.”
- 013
„The things that are really real last a very short time.”
- 014
„I want to make clear that I am not denying the existence of anything; I am only refusing to affirm it. I refuse to affirm the existence of anything for which there is no evidence, but I equally refuse to deny the existence of anything against which there is no evidence.”
- 015
„Therefore we shall say that a person is a certain series of experiences.”
- 016
„Science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know. Philosophy is that part of science which at present people choose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about.”
- 017
„The philosopher has an adventurous disposition and likes to dwell in the region where there are still uncertainties.”
- 018
„I always wish to get on in philosophy with the smallest possible apparatus, partly because it diminishes the risk of error, because it is not necessary to deny the entities you do not assert, and therefore you run less risk of error the fewer entities you assume.”
- 019
„Practically, unless you can find an example of the form you won't know that there is that form.”