A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. []
It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems.
No doubt, there are those who believe that judges - and particularly dissenting judges - write to hear themselves say, as it were, 'I, I, I. ' And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.
The above proposition is occasionally useful.
There are. . . other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.
Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.
I'd say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.
It is a matter for considerable regret that Fermat, who cultivated the theory of numbers with so much success, did not leave us with the proofs of the theorems he discovered. In truth, Messrs Euler and Lagrange, who have not disdained this kind of research, have proved most of these theorems, and have even substituted extensive theories for the isolated propositions of Fermat. But there are several proofs which have resisted their efforts.
In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated.
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.
We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.
There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.
Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.
True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.
To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.
I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule.
My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true.