John Searle Quotes

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

I was one of those kids who always thought that we should know how the world works around us.

Religion and science look at reality differently.

We tend to talk about the world in a myriad of ways - a microscopic world of elementary particles, a biological world of organisms and evolution, a social world of morality and meaning. But it's all the same underlying world. That's the underlying theme of 'The Big Picture.'

The world itself is already a great textbook.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.

Along with the evidence of common sense, researchers have proven scientifically that humans are all one people. We're a lot like dogs in that regard. If a Great Dane interacts (can we say interact?) with a Chihuahua, you get a dog.

Being involved with Oxfam has really opened my eyes to the world at large and the suffering of others. But my background and my life experience are what have allowed me to understand how interconnected we all are. I believe one person suffering reverberates throughout the world.

All true knowledge contradicts common sense.

Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

Science gives you an understanding of the physical world, and it increases the capacity for fascination.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

The soil needs the seed and the seed needs the soil. The one only has meaning with the other. It is the same thing with human beings. When male knowledge joins with female transformation, then the great magical union is created, and its name is wisdom. Wisdom means both to know and to transform.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.

If all people are encouraged to actually see who they're coexisting with, or even if they're not coexisting with other people.It's like to look at the world you're in.

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who's dreaming who?