Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by Ludwig Wittgenstein - Page 4

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.

People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Ambition is the death of thought.

Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway?

Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.

A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.

Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.

How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

That the world is, is the mystical.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

It is obvious that an imagined #? world , however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.