Society is unity in diversity.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

There are clear cases in which “understanding” literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes...

We often attribute “understanding” and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

Ego is to the true self what a flashlight is to a spotlight.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations – human emotions – taking an intellectual form.

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the...

Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment.

The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment’s thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has...

This does not deny, however, that they may be, as truths, the conclusions of other processes; to wit, the inductions of experience.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

I argue that neuroscience alone isn’t enough to explain consciousness, but I think it will be a major part of an eventual theory.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you...

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that’s in general a feature of intellectually active places.

The university’s business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist...

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.

I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the...

The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.

Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.

By what criterion… can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, – how can we distinguish which are...

An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived.

Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected...

To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.

Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with...

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give...

I want to block some common misunderstandings about “understanding”: In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word “understanding.”

As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.

In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves.