Browsing Topic Best Tautology Quotes

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology – we are quite unable to imagine the contrary…

Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for Him that He needs to have done – run errands for Him, carry messages for Him, fight on His side, feed His lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for Him that you need to do – sing songs for Him, tell Him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in Him.

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.

Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again.

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact

Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.

The two sides of the equation are the same. We have a tautology. The definition is meaningless.

My mother was Irish and she was superstitious, if you’ll forgive the tautology.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!