Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic ...statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in an...alysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call 'particulars'Msuch things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things--and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to h...old onto--God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So this is the subterranean life. If it can't be conjugated onto us, what good is it?... What need for purists when the demotic is built to last, To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"End of tomorrow. Don't try to start the car or look deeper... Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer Until the whole thing overflows like a silver Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are "shaggy dog" stories; they have a... point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For 'truth' itself is a...n abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance ... or a quality ... or a relation.... But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word 'true.' In vino, possibly, 'veritas,' but in a sober symposium 'verum.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge that for women in middle adulthood, multiple roles can tie in with well-being should help younger women who are stru...ggling with the pressures of small children and a job, and who may be tempted to abandon or severely curtail their career goals.... The woman who manages to hang onto her career may be in for some stress in her younger years when the pulls and tugs of family and career can be intense, but if she can persist, her chances for much smoother sailing in her mature years seem very good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politicians--power itself--are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives.... One sho...uld be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abjectness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person's qualities or possessions, jeal...ousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one's own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »