Top 50 Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

3. “One man’s antinomy is another man’s falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

4. “Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

6. “Set theory in sheep’s clothing.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

7. “Language is a social art.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

9. “Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

10. “It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

11. “Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

13. “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

15. “Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

16. “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

17. “Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato’s beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam’s razor.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

19. “Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

20. “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

21. “Wyman’s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

22. “Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

23. “The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

26. “We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

27. “We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

29. “Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

30. “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.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

31. “Treating ‘water’ as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

34. “An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

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

— Willard Van Orman Quine

37. “Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

38. “Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

39. “No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

40. “We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

41. “A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word – ‘Everything’ – and everyone will accept this answer as true.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

42. “To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

43. “Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

44. “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.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

45. “If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

46. “Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

47. “How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula “To be is to be the value of a variable”; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

48. “Nonsense is indeed mere absence of sense, and can always be remedied by arbitrarily assigning some sense.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

49. “The Humean predicament is the human predicament.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine

50. “Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine