Alfred Jules Ayer Quotes

God alone is real, and all else is illusion.

One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.

When you get back to fundamental questions - 'Why should anything exist?' A, I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of the science, and B, I'm not sure that science can even ask that question.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

What is this universe but name and form?

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

I am telling you that your perception of ultimate reality is more limited than you thought, and that Truth is more unlimited than you can imagine.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

It’s true, isn’t it? Then what else really matters?

The greatest mystery of all is reality.

Truths are more than imagination; they are real. Yet their origin is a thought in the mind of God.

We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask. Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.

What men have seen they know. . . .

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.