Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 2

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence
Ludwig Wittgenstein
But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.6.4311Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions", but to make propositions clear.Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don't think, but look! (PI 66)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
How small a thought it takes to fill a life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein