Famous quotes containing the words open, set and/or condition:
“We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden,—what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)