Quotations

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have formerly eat, be presented to us, we make no scruple of repeating the experiment, and foresee, with certainty, like nourishment and support.

But the further still it is from the original, the less valid it is, and has always less force in the mouth or writing of him that last made use of it than in his from whom he received it.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

He said that true opinion, combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion which had no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge

while they abide with us they are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are fastened by the tie of the cause

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

the unexamined life is not worth living

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.

I comprehend, by the faculty of judgment alone which is in the mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes.

I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

The wise and beneficent Author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures, two principles that tally with each other.

Believe truth! Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially different laws

a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat