Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 13

We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.

No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.

The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

There can never be surprises in logic.

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.