Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
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Don’t say: 'They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’' but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!
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310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says 'Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all.'
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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.
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Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
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It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.
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If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.
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The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
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The world is all that is the case. (1)
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Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
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Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. (6.4311)
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A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.
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Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
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The less somebody knows and understand himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.
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A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
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Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
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The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not 'Life'. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.
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Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
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It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
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378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
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There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
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What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)
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I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.
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What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.
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Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.