Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,808 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
A. J. Ayer
18 quotes
“There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis — about the meaning of what we say — and there is all of this … all of life.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.
“I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object that it is perceived does carry the implication that it exists.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940).
“No moral system can rest solely on authority.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Humanist Outlook (1968), p. 4.
“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.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2.
“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.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.
“It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Observer (17 August 1986).
“I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A statement he made soon after recovering from his near-death experience, as reported by Dr. Jeremy George, in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).
“I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his greater appreciation of the scenery of the world, after his near-death experience, as quoted in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).
“The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If now I…say "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning — that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "Stealing money!!" — where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, in his "The Meaning of Life", collected in The Meaning of Life, and Other Essays (1990)
Also quoted by: Joseph Addison (misattributed)
“While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principle. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And, consequently, any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure.”
A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source