Quotes and the organization of thoughts

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I believe that many of our thoughts can be represented in quote form. While some thoughts can be expressed in a single sentence, other thoughts are more complex and require an entire paragraph.

In my opinion, converting a thought into a quote is one of the most important activities an intellectual can engage in. Thoughts existing in the mind are hidden and it's the duty of an intellectual to create physical representations of these thoughts.

I like to think that every quote is a unique pebble. Every quote has its own unique properties and dynamics. Although a quote might have a similar meaning to another quote, it will still have a unique nature in the way the words are utilized. Also similar to pebbles, quotes can be very beautiful.

I enjoy collecting quotes and organizing them into clear structures. To me, structured quotes are easier to understand than continuous prose. Even when I write normally, I try to keep my paragraphs short and clear. Either way, I'm trying to organize thoughts into coherent structures.

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George Berkeley and idealism

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, John Smybert

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish philosopher best known for his contributions to idealism. Berkeley argued that material reality only exists through perception. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said,

"Berkeley was... the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism." (Parega and Paralipomena, 1851)

Philosopher Bertrand Russell said,

"[Berkeley] maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything..." (A History of Western Philosophy, 1945)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Berkeley.

Idealism

"The only thing we perceive are our perceptions." (Goodreads.com)

"It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding." (A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710)

"Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? Or is it something distinct from being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?" (Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713)

Reason

"The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense." (Goodreads.com)

"Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves." (De Motu, 1721)

"In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand, That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it." (De Motu, 1721)

"Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amuse philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and the complain, we cannot see." (AZquotes.com)

G. E. Moore and ethics

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Ray Strachey

G. E. Moore (1873-1958) was an English philosopher best known for his contributions to analytic philosophy, ethics and common sense realism. Wikipedia says,

"One of the most important parts of Moore's philosophical development was his break from the idealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachers F. H. Bradley and John McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a 'common sense' form of realism." (Wikipedia: G. E. Moore, 7.26.21 UTC 12:31)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Moore.

External reality

"I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture,with the right hand, 'Here is one hand' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, 'and here is the other'. And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things..." (Proof of an External World, 1939)

Ethics

"Moral conduct, or duty, is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action..." (Goodreads.com)

"For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them." (Principia Ethica, 1903)

What is good?

"If I am asked, 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is that to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it." (Principia Ethica, 1903)

"...if 'good' is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition." (Principia Ethica, 1903)

"If indeed good were a feeling... then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if so, then good cannot itself be  identical with any feeling." (Principia Ethica, 1903)

"We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good." (Principia Ethica, 1903)

Arthur Schopenhauer and will

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher best known for his philosophy of will and pessimistic orientation. Psychologist Carl Jung said,

"[Schopenhauer] was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil - all those things which the [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundamentals of the universe." (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Schopenhauer.

Will

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills," (On the Freedom of the Will, 1839)

"My body and my will are one." (The World and Will as Representation, 1819)

"Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will." (The World and Will as Representation, 1819)

Idealism

"For this perceptible and real world is obviously a phenomenon of the brain; and so in the assumption that the world as such might exist independently of all brains there lies a contradiction." (The World and Will as Representation, 1819)

God

"There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same tie, all-powerful Being; firstly the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be." (On the Sufferings of the World, 1850)

"The chief objection I have to pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world 'God' is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superflous synonym for the word 'world'." (On Pantheism)

Reason

"The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is inexplicable." (Counsels and Maxims, 1951)

"Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received. Of itself it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation... Concepts in general only exist after experience of ideas of perception, and as their whole nature consists in their relation to these, it is clear that they presuppose them." (The World and Will as Representation, 1819)

Independence of thought

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see." (The World and Will as Representation, 1819)

"Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognizes nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorized it." (Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851)

"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thought. Many books moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance." (Counsels and Maxims, 1951)

Bad writing

"From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effort to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible." (Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851)

J. L. Austin and language

J. L. Austin (1911-1960) was an British philosopher philosopher best known for his analysis of ordinary language and speech acts. Guy Longworth said,

"[J. L. Austin] made a number of contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language and the use of language in speech acts... His work on truth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions." (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Austin.

Language and reality

"After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness - the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough." (Sense and Sensibilia, 1962 posthumous)

"Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers." (Philosophical Papers, 1979 posthumous)

Word meaning

"Faced with the nonsense question, 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up." (Philosophical Papers, 1979 posthumous)

"Philosophers often seem to think that they can just 'assign' any meaning whatever to any word; and so no doubt, in an absolutely trivial sense, they can (like Humpty-Dumpty)." (Sense and Sensibilia, 1962 posthumous)

Word creation

"Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, the connexions they have found worth marketing, in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matter, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon..." (AZquotes.com)

"Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done... but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity." (A Plea for Excuses, 1956)

A. J. Ayer and verification

A. J. Ayer (1910-1989) was a British philosopher best known for his contributions to logical positivism and the verification principle. Ben Rogers said,

"In seeking to refound philosophy as an analytic discipline, Ayer was not just trying to separate philosophy from life but to liberate life from philosophy... To Ayer all this was not only unjustified - talk of supernatural reality, of beings existing outside space and time, or of the fundamental unity of things was literally senseless - but also reactionary." (A. J. Ayer: A Life, 1999)

Philosopher Julian Baggini said,

"Ayer's central mistake was to think that his principle could distinguish between the meaningful and meaningless. This error has two parts. First, a better distinction would be between the objective and subjective... The second part is to make the distinction binary where it should be spectral." (The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World, 2016)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Ayer.

What is philosophy?

"I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts." (Quoted in A.J Ayers: A Life by Ben Rogers)

"In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character... Accordingly, we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact." (AZquotes.com)

Verification

"The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to 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." (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936)

"There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed." (Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, 1982)

Transcendental reality

"Theism is so confused and the sentences in which God appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible." (AZquotes.com)

"I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it." (Goodreads.com)

"The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is knowledge... unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself." (AZquotes.com)

Metaphysics

"...It is possible to be a metaphysician without believing in a transcendent reality; for as we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience." (Goodreads.com)

P. F. Strawson and the conceptual framework

P. F. Strawson (1919-2006) was a British philosopher best known for his contributions to the philosophy of language. Philosopher Jane O'Grady said,

"Strawson, first gained philosophical fame at the age of 29 in 1950, when he criticised Bertrand Russell' renowned theory of descriptions for failing to do justice to the richness of ordinary language." (Obituary Sir Peter Strawson, 2006)

Wikipedia says,

"In his book Individuals (1959), Strawson attempts to give a description of various concepts that form and interconnected web, representing (part of) our common, shared conceptual scheme. In particular, he examines our conceptions of basic particulars, and how they are variously brought under general spatio-temporal concepts." (Wikipedia: P. F. Strawson, 8.14.21 UTC 20:52)

The rest of this post is some quotes from Strawson.

Concepts

"There is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history - or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all... It is with these, their interconnexions, and the structure that they form, that descriptive metaphysics will be primarily be concerned." (Individuals, 1959)

"Part of my aim is to exhibit some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in terms of which we think about particular things." (Individuals, 1959)

Language

"Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic." (On Referring, 1950)

"It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species." (Introduction to Logical Theory, 1952)