Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
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.
Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
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.
The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
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.
Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.
The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.
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.
In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
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