“It should be said that such an art would be neither more false nor more true than classical art.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter
Cubism was born
“It should be said that such an art would be neither more false nor more true than classical art.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter
Cubism was born
Victor Hugo book Les Misérables
Variant: What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.
Source: Les Misérables
James Frazer book The Golden Bough
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.
Context: From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
1940s
Context: Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
“If the meanings of true and false were switched, this sentence wouldn't be false.”
Douglas Hofstadter book I Am a Strange Loop
I Am a Strange Loop (2007) p. 68
“Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.”
Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics
Book I, 1096a.16
Nicomachean Ethics
“Sentences are not as such either true or false”
J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher
Austin (1962) Sense and Sensibilia p. 111.