Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.Collection: House Of Cards
I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.Collection: Average
The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.Collection: Self
The depressed man lives in a depressed world.Collection: Men
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.Collection: Spiritual
The world is everything that is the case.Collection: World
Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.Collection: Science
The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.Collection: Philosophy
Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.Collection: Superstitions
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.Collection: Thinking
6.4311 Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist. 6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.Collection: Men
The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.Collection: Christian
Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.Collection: Goal
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.Collection: Architecture
Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holidayCollection: Philosophical
Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.Collection: Important
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.Collection: Philosophy
An entire mythology is stored within our language.Collection: Language
A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.Collection: Religious
The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.Collection: Creativity
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.Collection: Games
Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.Collection: Design
When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line and that its direction changes constantly.Collection: Moving
I am my world.Collection: World
And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.Collection: Language
For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.Collection: Death
The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.Collection: Differences
Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.Collection: Philosophy
It is love that believes the resurrection.Collection: Believe
You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourselfCollection: Hurt
When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.Collection: Home
Elementary propositions consist of names.Collection: Names
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.Collection: Squares
We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.Collection: Enough
Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.Collection: Genius
Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.Collection: Thinking
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.Collection: Philosophy
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.Collection: Writing
"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.Collection: Impossible
The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.Collection: Self
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.Collection: Giving
A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.Collection: Philosophical
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?Collection: Life
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.Collection: Mean
If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.Collection: World
Tell them I've had a wonderful life.Collection: Wonderful
Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.Collection: Running
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.Collection: Certainty
Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?Collection: Knowledge