Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.
It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.
A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."
Aim at being loved without being admired.
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.
What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
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.