Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 4

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

Ambition is the death of thought.

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.

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).

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

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

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.

We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.

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

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.