I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
A.J. AyerBertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
A.J. AyerThe principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.
A.J. AyerWhile moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
A.J. AyerIn other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact.
A.J. Ayer