Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.
Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.
Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.
Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.
For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.
I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.
Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
Man is the microcosm: I am my world.
What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.
In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
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