Famous quotes containing the words circular and/or bearing:
“‘A thing is called by a certain name because it instantiates a certain universal’ is obviously circular when particularized, but it looks imposing when left in this general form. And it looks imposing in this general form largely because of the inveterate philosophical habit of treating the shadows cast by words and sentences as if they were separately identifiable. Universals, like facts and propositions, are such shadows.”
—David Pears (b. 1921)
“In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)