Willard Van Orman Quine

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”

“Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”

“Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory.”

“No entity without identity.”

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

“The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs... is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”

“Logic, like any science, has as its business the pursuit of truth.”

“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.”

“The Humean predicament is the human predicament.”

“I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so.”

“For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.”

“Two dogmas of empiricism have been challenged. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.”

“Language is a social art.”

“Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”

“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.”