Desire Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

“Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.” quote by Willard Van Orman Quine — Download Open image

“Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.”

Willard Van Orman Quine

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.3 out of 5 (10 ratings)

More by Willard Van Orman Quine

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and…

Willard Van Orman Quine

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

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum…

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

Some may find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who…

Willard Van Orman Quine

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Image

Explore all 67 Willard Van Orman Quine quotes

More Desire quotes

I put myself in the student's place and remember the frustrations, doubts, determination, and desires I felt when I was going through the initial…

Ted Martinez

Image

Passion is what you need to be good, an unforgiving passion.

David Easton

Image

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is…

John Burns

Image

Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes…

John Armstrong

Image

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is…

Frederick Douglass

On the brink of being satiated, desire still appears infinite.

Jean Rostand

Image

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image

He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and…

Victor Hugo

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not…

John Steinbeck

Image

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

John Dewey

Image

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented…

Betsy Lerner