Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.
What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.
To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.
"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
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.
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.
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)
A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.
A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)
If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.
The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)
I got a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days after the Armistice, he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately with his manuscript. It appears he had written a book in the trenches, and wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. ... It was the book which was subsequently published under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last.