Fact - Quotes
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, `I am going to produce a work of art`. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt.
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. ?
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
Sometimes an impossibility in fact is theoretically more interesting than a possibility in principle.
The fact is, the heart and mind aren`t always friendly. And in my case, they`re barely speaking.
At some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.