A Quote by George Santayana
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
Experience is valuable only if it's imbued with meaning from which one can draw salient conclusions. Otherwise, experience becomes imprisoning.
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.
Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.
...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.
There are two modes of knowledge: through argument and through experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience.
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
If you draw your sword against those you sworn to protect, the very ones who trust in your strength, how will you convince them that you are a shield when the dragons come and take them away?
I'm a self trained, autodidactic artist, so all I was ever trying to do was to draw as realistically as possible - but that's what comes out, because I don't really know how to draw! I think when I draw characters, I'm able to reduce them down to little marks that capture the most distinct elements of them.
I like to bring my kids to the voting booth to show them how it works. I'll let them draw their own conclusions as to how worthwhile it is.
The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.
It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.
This is the problem with the way you educate your children. You don't want your young ones drawing their own conclusions. You want them to come to the same conclusions that you came to. Thus you doom them to repeat the mistakes to which your own conclusions led you.
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist