Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
The world and life are one. (5.621)
The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.
The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.
I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.
[I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..
I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)
Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.
Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don't appreciate that.
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.
What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
An entire mythology is stored within our language.