J. L. Austin Quotes

But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

It’s not what you say; it’s what people hear.

Clothes are endless possibilities for meaning because with every change or different association, you are a different person.

With photography, you've captured a moment time - it's that moment only - and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It's about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.

Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.

Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.

Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

Of all false assertions that ever went into the world under the banner of a great name and the mail armor of a well-turned phrase, Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank sheet of paper appears to me among the most untrue.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.