Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
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.
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? — Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?
What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
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.