One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

Language is a social art.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.

Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

Welcome, wild harbinger of spring! To this small nook of earth; Feeling and fancy fondly cling, Round thoughts which owe their birth, To thee, and to the humble spot, Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, 'Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.'

There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.

Well, you know I have an office, my film offices. So I know that syndrome. I fancy offices, so there must be something wrong with me. Even the window cleaner intrigues me. It's a very sexy environment.

I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.

I fancy that no good ideas upon that campaign will be mentioned at any time that did not receive their share of consideration by General Lee.

I fancy our chances at the European Championships.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

We happened to be in the studio next door and I think Noel Redding came around and said, 'Do you fancy having a sing on this?' We just went and did it and it was great.

The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

Why do you need to do a fancy cartwheel for before you hit him? It just looks stupid.

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

I don't get to go to the super fancy stores unless I am in L.A. so you stay pretty real and normal that way.

You speak into it and everything is recorded, voice, tone, intonation, everything. You turn a little wheel, and forth it comes, and can be repeated ten thousand times. Only fancy what this suggests.

Somebody is going to have to do fancy footwork to make sure Elizabeth and John Edwards get their prime-time shot .

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.

The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced.

I only knew basic western trail riding. Nothing fancy.

Buonaparte has often made his boast that our fleet would be worn out by keeping the sea and that his was kept in order and increasing by staying in port; but know he finds, I fancy, if Emperors hear the truth, that his fleet suffers more in a night than ours in one year.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.

People are approaching electronic levels in music; although not all of it happens to tickle my fancy.