Closed Elements

Famous quotes containing the words closed and/or elements:

    Since time immemorial, one the dry earth, scraped to the bone, of this immeasurable country, a few men travelled ceaselessly, they owned nothing, but they served no one, free and wretched lords in a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this idea filled her with a sadness so soft and so vast that she closed her eyes. She only knew that this kingdom, which had always been promised to her would never be her, never again, except at this moment.
    Albert Camus 1013–1960, French-Algerian novelist, dramatist, philosopher. Janine in Algeria, in The Fall, p. 27, Gallimard (9157)

    English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)