Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.

The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise for itself an engine of expression which is logically defensible at every point and which tends to correspond to the rigorous spirit of modern science.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

When I get logical, and I don't trust my instincts - that's when I get in trouble.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.