fact quotes
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability.We say that a sentence isfactually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to 44 verify the proposition which it purports to express that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if theyare, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.
It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.
This world is bad enough maybe; We do not comprehend it; But in one fact can all agree God won't, and we can't mend it.
To be an American is an ideal, whileto be a Frenchman is a fact.
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Fact is stranger than fiction.You see people walking down the street that would never be allowed on television.You have to tone it down.
C'est de la' que vient tout le mal: Dieu est un homme. All evil comes from this fact: God is a man.
Science is the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact upon another.
All theobjects of humanreasonorenquiry maynaturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No.Commit itthen tothe flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
The great tragedy of Sciencethe slaying of a beautiful hypothesis byan ugly fact.
Next tobeing right inthis world, thebest of all things isto be clearly and definitely wrong. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutelyand thoroughlyand persistently wrong you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking yourheadagainstafact, andthat setsyouallstraightagain.
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, themost self-conscious people inthe world, and themost addictedtothebeliefthattheothernations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
Negative Capability; that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
The news of the dayas it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper isinall literalnessthebibleofdemocracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided.
The most striking of all the impressions that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of African national consciousness. In different places it may take different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent.Whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact.
The product oftheartist hasbecome less importantthan the fact of the artist.We wish to absorb this person.We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic.Inour society thisperson ismuchmore important than anything he might create.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
I take to be the central fact to man born in America I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.
L'on a beau se cacher a' soi-me" me, l'on aime toujours. We vainly conceal from ourselves the fact that we are always in love.
Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to powerbut also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of [the] universe, every phase of present or past lifetherein, has been examined, classified, and coordinatedwith the rest, thenthemissionof sciencewill be completed.What isthisbut saying thatthetaskof science canneverend till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?
The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
Only a fact could be so dreamlike.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
You can't figure him out like a fact, because to Reagan themainfact was avision He came fromtheheartland of the country, where people could be down-to-earth yet feel that the sky is the limitnot ashamed of, or cynical about, the American dream.
Quite as many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as to her status elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.
You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.
The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.
It isthespirit of theageto believethat any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else.But the fact is, you got to give 'em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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