Max Black Quotations

We've got to keep it going. I haven't lost to them. I can't start.

I think it was a pretty good momentum booster, ... because they were starting to move the chains.

It gives you pressure to perform. That's what you want to do. If you don't have the pressure on you, you're not going to excel. I like it.

Our senior class has always wanted to live up to the legacy of Highland football. We thought we were going to be just as good as some of the other classes last year. Now it feels like we have to live up to it even more, because we weren't as successful.

... a result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs. The Nature of Mathematics

Fine doesn't mean fine! The scale goes: great, good, okay, not okay, I hate you, fine.

... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

...a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.