The general doctrine about knowledge which I sketched at the beginning of this section, which is the real bugbear underlying doctr...ines of the kind we have been discussing, is radically and in principle misconceived. [It] would be a mistake in principle to suppose that the same thing could be done for knowledge in general. And this is because there could be no general answer to the questions what is evidence for what, what is certain, what is doubtful, what needs or does not need evidence, can or can't be verified. If the Theory of Knowledge consists in finding grounds for such an answer, there is no such thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories a...re nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has e...ver tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To regard the successful experiences which ensue from a belief as a criterion of its truth is one thing--and a thing that is somet...imes bad and sometimes good--but to assume that truth itself consists in the process by which it is verified is a different thing and always bad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Don Pedro. Officers, what offence have these men done? Dogberry. Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover they ...have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men ...from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself,--how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented,... and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo,--I am not without hope that we may, even here and now, obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »