What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.
What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
The very fact that we are looking for something usually stands in the way of our finding it.
disguise repetitiousness of fact under variety of form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle of words. It deceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it gives you the idea that the court is carrying on like everything; this excites you...
The commonest error of the gifted scholar, inexperienced in teaching, is to expect pupils to know what they have been told. But telling is not teaching. The expression of facts that are in one's mind is a natural impulse when one wishes others to kno...
When I found him lying in the ditch holding a shovel, I thought he was sleeping on the job. Turns out he was being even lazier, and he was in fact dead.
It’s not: I jumped in, and it was cold. No. It was cold, and I jumped in. Always arrange a sentence so you appear to be fearless, when in fact you are far less than fearless—you are clueless.
The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part o...
In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived a...
I don’t dwell on the fact that I may have ridden on planes. That which I can’t remember having needed, I simply accept. It is the most preferable kind of self-insight: one that does not require any accompanying change in behavior.
. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equal...
Grigsby had looked at him askance. “Why is it,” he said, “that I have the distinct impression you’re not surprised by this news?” ‘Surprised by the fact that the reverend is first and foremost a human being? Surprised by the fact that eve...
It surely can be no offence to state, that the progress of science has led to new views, and that the consequences that can be deduced from the knowledge of a hundred facts may be very different from those deducible from five. It is also possible tha...
Goodbyes are sad, but they are temporary, because as hellos ends with goodbyes, so will goodbyes start with hellos.
Songs are as sad as the listener.
She seemed imprisoned in her sadness.
There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.
It's sad, actually, because my anxiety keeps me from enjoying things as much as I should at this age.
What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.
