The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.
The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.
Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.
Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
The world is everything that is the case.
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.
Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
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.
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.
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.
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