Ruth Hubbard Quotes

It's always interesting just to see how the human mind is relating to the natural universe, and what we try to make of it just so we can believe we understand what's going on.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

We see only what we have names for.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Science is nothing but perception.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

What transforms this world is - knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.

Being that can be understood is language.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

What one doesn't understand one doesn't possess.

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Taking it in its wider and generic application, I understand faith to be the supplement of sense; or, to change the phrase, all knowledge which comes not to us through our senses we gain by faith in others.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.