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"Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence."
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"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it."

"We are born more dead than when we die after we have searched death through the storm of the instants of our entire life."

"The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it."

"Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour."
Explore more quotes by John Searle

"In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on."

"An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived."

"I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing."

"Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples."

"Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself."

"Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places."

"We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions."

"Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed."

"I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding.""

"There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument."
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