Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
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For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.
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My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)
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When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.
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Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.
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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
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A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.
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Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (6.51)
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But if you say: 'How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?' then I say: 'How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?'
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Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
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You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.
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It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.
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Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up 'What's that?' - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said 'this is a man,' 'this is a house,' etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?
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612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
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I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.
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Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
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We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
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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.
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But ordinary language is all right.
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Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?
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If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?
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Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)
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The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)
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What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.