“As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.”
“Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.”
“Pay your sacrifice to the Graces—and to clarity first among the Graces.”
“Avoid excess: art's true maxim.”
“The business of writing demands two—the author and the reader.”
“Order and arrangement are duties we owe to those who honor us with their attention.”
“Clarity is courtesy to the reader.”
“Literature is a living art; therefore it must be personal and of its essence personal.”
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
“Style is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament.”
“No statement is immune to revision.”
“Two dogmas of empiricism: the analytic–synthetic distinction and reductionism.”
“The Humean predicament is the human predicament.”
“We are committed to those entities to which the bound variables of our best theories must be capable of referring.”
“What there is does not in general depend on language.”
“Ontological questions, under this view, are on a par with questions of natural science.”
“Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.”
“Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”
“Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
“A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘‘What is there?’’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘‘Everything’’.”