Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 10

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

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?

The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

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.

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

'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.

That the world is, is the mystical.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things

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.

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

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

The face is the soul of the body.

Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.

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

We must plow through the whole of language.