For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture. — William of Ockham
Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past. — Thomas Hobbes
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities. — Aristotle
The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge. — Rene Descartes
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. — Immanuel Kant
We call first truths those we discover after all the others. — Albert Camus
Induction for deduction, with a view to construction. — Auguste Comte
The effort to strive for truth has to precede all
other efforts. — Albert Einstein
Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. — Edmund Husserl
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. — Immanuel Kant
To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. — Albert Einstein
All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. — Mao Zedong
In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. — Hugh Walpole
Short Priori Quotes
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars. — H. L. Mencken
A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world. — Bertrand Russell
Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise. — Saul Kripke
I still go to a Christian priory for retreats. — Lionel Blue
History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. — Arthur Koestler
Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue. — Paulo Freire
I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth. — Kurt Gödel
Prioritize Quotes
The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. — Stephen Covey
Having a child is an experience that teaches a person how important to prioritize the happiness of another person.Whatever you do, even whatever you are, is an example for him . In fact, that little being who depends on you so much , makes you also to have a huge dependence on him. — Neymar
Time tells you what you didn’t accomplish. Focus turns off the clock and directs all your energy to the result. — Tim Grover
Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo. — Maajid Nawaz
You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic. — Naval Ravikant
The United States has never prioritized or failed to pay any obligation when due during a debt limit impasse. — Jerome Powell
If everything in your life feels urgent, it means nothing is. Not everything in life can be a ‘priority’. Master the skill of identifying what really matters & what is truly essential. Start putting your focus and energy there and watch your life start to change. — Rangan Chatterjee
Often the easiest strategy to do more of what matters is to do less of what doesn’t. — Greg Brockman
Priority Quotes
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds — Paul the Apostle
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option. — Mark Twain
Your character is your accumulation of your thoughts, habits and priorities on a day-to-day basis. — Nick Saban
Creativity follows mastery, so mastery of skills is the first priority for young talent. — Benjamin Bloom
Most of our troubles are due to poor implementation….wrong priorities and unattainable targets — J. R. D. Tata
Child labour is an issue of grave importance. It must become a top priority for all governments of the world. How can the world move into the twenty-first century with children still being exploited for their labour and denied their basic right to an education? — Craig Kielburger
Globalization can be very unjust and unfair and unequal, but these are matters under our control. Its not that we dont need the market economy. We need it. But the market economy should not have priority or dominance over other institutions. — Amartya Sen
The most valuable "currency" of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader's highest priority. — W. Edwards Deming
Some atheists are quite explicit that their atheism comes first. One of the most famous is Richard Lewontin, a professor of genetics, who said it wasn't science that compelled him to accept a materialistic explanation of the universe. It was an a priori materialism. — John Lennox
The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling. — John Polkinghorne
Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori. — Immanuel Kant
All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P. — Jacques Derrida
The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models. — Lawrence M. Krauss
FACT: The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci. — Dan Brown
All of life is iterative. It goes back to the point I made earlier, which is you can't a priori know enough to even ask the right questions. — Grady Booch
What I most cherish is the observation of the movement of colors. Only in this have I found the laws of those simultaneous and complementary color contrasts that nourish the actual rhythm of my vision. In this I find the actual essence, an essence which is not born out of an a priori system or theory. — August Macke
But what I attach great importance to is observation of the movement of colors. It is only in this way that I have found the laws of complementary contrast and the simultaneity of those colors that nourish the rhythm of my vision. There I find the representative essence — which does not arise from a system or an a priori theory. — Robert Delaunay
Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions. — Immanuel Kant
Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself. — Benjamin Graham
I don't think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore passed on to us by our ancestors in light of our experiences, and the best a philosopher can do is to learn as much about what has been discovered in various empirical fields, and use it to try to craft an improved synthesis. — Philip Kitcher
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. — Robert M. Pirsig
We come now to the question: what is a priori certain or necessary, respectively in geometry (doctrine of space) or its foundations? Formerly we thought everything; nowadays we think nothing. Already the distance-concept is logically arbitrary; there need be no things that correspond to it, even approximately. — Albert Einstein
The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand. — Heisenberg
We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. — Herbert Spencer
I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy. — Percy Williams Bridgman
It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. — Ronald Fisher
The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large. — Massimo Pigliucci
Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics. — Immanuel Kant
In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction. — John Quiggin
Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant. — Max Horkheimer
Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. — George Wald
given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love. — Milan Kundera
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ideals, of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax. — Lionel Trilling
It is possible to demonstrate God's existence, although not a priori, yet a posteriori from some work of His more surely known to us. — Thomas Aquinas
I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature. — Gottfried Leibniz
Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate. — Richard P. Feynman
In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory. — Robert Delaunay
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori. — Carl Friedrich Gauss
I don't believe in capital per se or a priori but I do occasionally believe in personal capital vis-a- vis psychic energy exchange. I use the word "capital" only poetically. — Kool A.D.
There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge. — Tim Crane
Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere. — Pankaj Mishra
We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good. — Simone de Beauvoir
There's nothing a priori good about equality. One person has three televisions, the other has two, so what? — Catherine Wilson
We can pursue the Cartesian project without restricting ourselves to theology and a priori faculties. A better, broader perspective is properly sought if we pursue the project with reliance on science broadly and on our full span of epistemic competences, including the empirical as well as the a priori. — Ernest Sosa
The data on which philosophical theorizing is based are rather the intuited contents themselves, concerning the various thought experiments. At least that is so outside the epistemology of the a priori. — Ernest Sosa
Philosophers need not much use the word 'intuition' or the concept of intuition, except when they happen to be working on the epistemology of the a priori. — Ernest Sosa
I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record. — Hilary Kornblith
I am concerned about epistemic normativity, and I don't think that it is just a hangover from a priori and armchair approaches. Some ways of forming beliefs are better than others, and epistemologists of all stripes, I believe, have a legitimate interest in addressing the issue of what makes some of these ways better than others. — Hilary Kornblith
A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way... The kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation...is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world.... That is the "miracle" which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands. — Albert Einstein
In Conclusion
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