Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.
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.
He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don't appreciate that.
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.
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.
If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.
So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
But ordinary language is all right.
Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.
I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.
The thought is the significant proposition. (4)
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.