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“If we can observe that an event of a certain kind is a sufficient condition of an earlier event of some other kind, it does not seem to matter much whether we choose to call that latter event the ‘cause’ of the earlier or not: the question rather is why we should not use this observed regularity as we use those that operate from earlier to later” (320)

From “Can an Effect Precede its Cause?”

“O is small;
If N is small, N + 1 is small;
Therefore, every number is small”

(256)

Wang’s Paradox, the inverse of the Greek paradox of the heap. Imagine a small number (N) such that N + 1 is not also a small number.

A problem in vague statements and the measurement of truth in bivalent terms.

"it seems that we ought to interpose between the platonist and the constructivist picture an intermediate picture, say of objects springing into being in response to our probing. We do not make the objects but must accept them as we find them [...] but they were not already there for our statements to be true or false of before we carried out the investigations which brought them into being" (185)

“The mental images that a word may arouse in the mind of a speaker or hearer are irrelevant to its meaning, which consists, rather, in the part played by the word in determining the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs” (94)

“We no longer explain the sense of a statement by stipulating it’s truth-value in terms of the truth-values of its constituents, but by stipulating the when it may be asserted in terms of the conditions under which its constituents may be asserted” (18). True is what is decidedly or determinantly true by reference to the situation of use.

“the city is a partnership of similar persons, for the sake of a life that is the best possible” (209)

“Spiritedness perverts rulers and the best men. Hence law is intellect without appetite” (114)

“The greatest injustices are committed out of excess, then, not because of necessary things—no one becomes a tyrant in order to get out of the cold” (68-69)

"You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it it a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!" (403)

“He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave them sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity“ (148)

On assessing the truth of propositions: “the objects we suppose our sentences to be about are nothing but the shadows of certain parts of speech, and shadows we do not need in explaining truth. Truth itself is not a relation between a statement and something the statement is about” (45-46).

“About Socrates no conventional literary work can be written, for Socrates does not treat the events around him as worthy of much regard. The only ‘plot’ in which he takes an interest is the unfolding of the argument” (64)

The unity of reason is the unity of a system, and this systematic unity does not serve reason objectively as a principle, extending it over objects, but subjectively as a maxim, in order to extend it over all possible empirical cognitions of objects (610)

“Every beginning is in time, and every boundary of the extended is in space. Space and time, however, are only in the world of sense. Hence appearances are in the world only conditionally, the world itself is neither conditioned nor bounded in an unconditioned way” (527)

“Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world” (160)

“If, therefore we say: The senses represent objects to us as they appear, but the understanding as they are, then the latter is not going to be taken in a transcendental but in a merely empirical way, signifying, namely, how they must be represented as objects of experience […]” (364)

“the categories [i.e., of analytic judgement] do not afford us cognition of things by means of intuition except through their possible application to empirical intuition, i.e., they serve only for the possibility of empirical cognition. This, however, is called experience” (255). An elegant argument that escapes the difficulties Locke and Hume faced in deriving understanding from experience.

“all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance” (185)

"we have immeasurably more reason to congratulate ourselves than to complain of our lot, since for most of our hardships we have only ourselves to blame. It would be especially wrong to complain of the deficiencies in our knowledge, when we make so little use of the knowledge which kindly nature does give to us" (388)

Settembrini: “I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism” (249).

“And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he might have expected, but what is hardly permitted a man to see, and what he never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave” (218)

“Nature the Architect did very well, it seems to me , making men so sensitive to things which have so little effect on the senses. If we were incapable of becoming ambitious or miserly, it would be hard for us [..] to become virtuous and rational enough to work towards our own perfection in the face of the present pleasures which distract us from it” (205)

Matter without unique qualities but continua of the same qualities" ... all bodies have a degree of cohesion; just as I think that there are none which are entirely without fluidity or possessed of a cohesion which cannot be overcome; so that in my view the atoms of Epicurus, which are supposed to be unconquerably hard, cannot exist, any more than can the rarefied and perfectly fluid matter of the Cartesians (125)"

Such rich characters that say so much with their actions.

“I have traced the fundamental elements of epagogics and epigenetics and explained how not only protomory but above all heteromory is the condition of mankind at present, and its course a fatal course: dysexelixis contra diexelixis” (130).

“a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as easily as a radical stir in her own” (293).

“He was a young workman in a white blouse, and with some dust in the creases of his clothes; and in passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through him as though a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.” (91)

“Great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit; a poet may make a great embodiment of a myth, but it is the mass of humanity that knows the myth to be a spiritual truth, and that is why they cherish his poem” (147)

“Understanding and experience are not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experience the fire” (84)