Great Throughts Treasury

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. "

"Physiological life is of course not "Life." And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. "

"Do I really see something different each time, or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former. To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state."

"A picture is a model of reality. "

"I can well imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, so that nothing is spoken. Clearly, then, the essence of religion can have nothing to do with what is sayable. "

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul. "

"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did exist, it would have no value. "

"The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is. "

"At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded."

"The solution of the problem that you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. "

"A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide."

"A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting."

"A confession has to be part of your new life."

"3?18 inches won?t go into 3 feet. This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility. The proposition ?three men can?t sit side by side on a bench a yard long? states a physical impossibility; and this example shows clearly why the two impossibilities are confused. (Compare the proposition ?He is 6 inches taller than I? with ?6 foot is 6 inches longer than 5 foot 6?. These propositions are of utterly different kinds, but look exactly alike.)"

"A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honorably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die."

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."

"A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion."

"A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view."

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

"A logical picture of facts is a thought."

"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."

"A philosophical problem has the form: "I don't know my way about." A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

"A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture."

"A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in."

"A picture is a fact."

"A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can."

"A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.)"

"A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense."

"A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says ?Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don?t make sense at all.?"

"A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism."

"A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom."

"'A whole world of pain is contained in these words.' How can it be contained in them? - It is bound up with them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow."

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

"About what one cannot speak, one must remain silent."

"Academic philosophy in our day stands to Wittgenstein as intellectual life in Germany in the first decades of the last century stood to Kant. Kant had changed everything, but no one was sure just what Kant had said?no one was sure what in Kant to take seriously and what to put aside. To think seriously, in Germany in those days, was either to pick and choose from Kant or to find some way of turning one?s back on him altogether. Philosophers are in an analogous situation now, twenty years after the publication of the Investigations. One must either reject Wittgenstein?s characterization of what philosophy has been or find something new for philosophy to be."

"All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one."

"All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life."

"Although the spots in our picture are geometrical ?gures, geometry can obviously say nothing about their actual form and position. But the network is purely geometrical, and all its properties can be given a priori. Laws, like the law of causation, etc., treat of the network and not of what the network described."

"An "inner process" stands in need of outward criteria."

"An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."

"All propositions are of equal value."

"Always get rid of theory private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you."

"Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly."

"And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.""

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

"An operation shows itself in a variable; it shows how we can proceed from one form of proposition to another. It gives expression to the di?erence between the forms. (And that which is common to the bases, and the result of an operation, is the bases themselves.)"

"Are the rules, for example, ~ ~ p = p for negation, responsible to the meaning of a word? No. The rules constitute the meaning, and are not responsible to it. The meaning changes when one of its rules changes. If, for example, the game of chess is defined in terms of its rules, one cannot say the game changes if a rule for moving a piece were changed. Only when we are speaking of the history of the game can we talk of change. Rules are arbitrary in the sense that they are not responsible to some sort of reality-they are not similar to natural laws; nor are they responsible to some meaning the word already has. If someone says the rules of negation are not arbitrary because negation could not be such that ~~p =~p, all that could be meant is that the latter rule would not correspond to the English word "negation"."

"Anyone can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remainsthe same."

"As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility."

"Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business."