Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
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.
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)
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.
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."
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.
Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.
If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.
Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. (5.61)
Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!!
That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts. ——
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.
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)
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.
It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)
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.
Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?
This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)