Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 5

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

The world divides into facts.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

It is love that believes the resurrection.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."

I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

A picture is a model of reality.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

The world is independent of my will.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

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

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.