Quotes from 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.

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

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

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

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

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 is doomed to failure equally.

Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

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.

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.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.

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.

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.