Ludwig Wittgenstein

"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

"Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness."

"I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around."

"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."

"One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature."

"You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage."

"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."

"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie."

"Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings."

"Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?"

"Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself."

"It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems."

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."

"Ambition is the death of thought."

"I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)"

"Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own."

"If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained."

"Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous."

"The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within."

"One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way."

"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?"

"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open."

"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

"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."

"For a truly religious man nothing is tragic."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language."

"I can well understand why children love sand."

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."

"It was Wittgenstein who evacuated time from language, and thereby converted it into an ahistorical absolute. He was able to do this because he lacked any notion of contradiction. The idea that linguistic change proceeds by an internal dialectic generated by incompatibilities between different rule-systems within it, which give rose to radically new concepts at determinate historical moments, was beyond his horizon. It presupposed an idea of language as neither a monist unity (Tractatus) nor a heteroclite plurality (Investigations), but as a complex totality, necessarily inhabited by different contradictions. It is striking that today, French philosophy is largely concentrated on the problem of the conditions of appearance of new concepts—precisely the problem that English philosophy is designed to avert. The work of Canguilhem and Bachelard is a close study of the historical emergence in the west of the scientific concepts which revolutionized biology and physics. Such an inquiry is a diametric opposite of the whole drift of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and indicates its parochialism. To emphasise the social nature of language, as he did, is not enough: language is a structure with a history, and it has a history because its contradictions and discrepancies themselves are determined by other levels of social practice. The magical harmony of language affirmed by English philosophy was itself merely the transcript of a historically becalmed society."

"Whereas Wittgenstein had imagined an indefinite multiplicity of language-games, incommensurable with each other, so paving the way for the particularist doctrine that the signification of sentences could only lie in their heterogeneous usages, Frege understood that language is by its nature a system, competence in which presupposes a tacit grasp of certain general principles that are never reducible to a mere tally of local utterances. At the same time, Frege's philosophy, for all its emphasis on meaning, was not only systematic, but critical. For it retained a stringent concern with truth, where the laxity of Wittgenstein's eventual pragmatics—his notion that all language-games can find their warrant in culturally variable ‘forms of life’, as apprehended by Spengler—was inevitably to afford a franchise for intellectual relativism. Initially close to Wittgenstein's legacy, Dummett came through his prolonged work on Frege to a reaffirmation of the central importance of the assertoric dimension of language—the specificity and necessity of its claims to accurate report of the world—as against the performative functions so favoured by Austin, for whom there could be no critique of current usages. Wittgenstein's basic programme thus had to be rejected: ‘philosophy cannot be content to leave everything as it is,’ for ‘linguistic practice is not immune to, and may well stand in need of, revision.’"

"The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question."

"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."

""Ist ein falscher Gedanke nur einmal kühn und klar ausgedrückt, so ist damit schon viel gewonnen." VB 144 (1948), vgl. books.google"

""Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens." VB 560 (1948), vgl. books.google"

"Wir kämpfen mit der Sprache. Wir stehen im Kampf mit der Sprache."

"Die Tragödie besteht darin, daß sich der Baum nicht biegt, sondern bricht."

"Esperanto. Das Gefühl des Ekels, wenn wir ein erfundenes Wort mit erfundenen Ableitungssilben aussprechen. Das Wort ist kalt, hat keine Assoziationen und spielt doch 'Sprache'. Ein bloß geschriebenes Zeichen würde uns nicht so anekeln."

"Nur sich nicht in Teilprobleme verstricken, sondern immer dort hinaus flüchten, wo man freien Überblick über das ganze eine große Problem hat, wenn auch dieser Überblick noch unklar ist!"

"Gut und Böse tritt erst durch das Subjekt ein. Und das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern ist eine Grenze der Welt."

"Die Verwirrung und Öde der Psychologie ist nicht damit zu erklären, dass sie eine »junge Wissenschaft« sei; ihr Zustand ist mit dem der Physik z.B. in ihrer Frühzeit nicht zu vergleichen. (Eher noch mit dem gewissen Zweige der Mathematik. Mengenlehre.) Es bestehen nämlich, in der Psychologie, experimentelle Methoden und Begriffsverwirrung. (Wie im andern Fall Begriffsverwirrung und Beweismethoden.) // Das Bestehen der experimentellen Methode läßt uns glauben, wir hätten das Mittel, die Probleme, die uns beunruhigen, loszuwerden; obgleich Problem und Methode windschief aneinander vorbeilaufen."

""Eine Hauptursache philosophischer Krankheiten"

""Was ich lehren will, ist: Von einem nicht offenkundigen Unsinn zu einem offenkundigen übergehen." §464"

"Ein philosophisches Problem hat die Form: »Ich kenne mich nicht aus.«"

"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."

"Die Idee sitzt gleichsam als Brille auf unsrer Nase, und was wir ansehen, sehen wir durch sie. Wir kommen gar nicht auf den Gedanken, sie abzunehmen."

""Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache." §43"

"Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit."