Great Throughts Treasury

"Black seems to make a color cloudy, but darkness doesn't. A ruby could thus keep getting darker without ever becoming cloudy; but if it became blackish red, it would become cloudy."

"Belief in the causal nexus is superstition."

"Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied."

"Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical."

"But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?""

"But ordinary language is all right."

"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn?t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved."

"But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings ? shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it."

"Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything."

"Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God."

"Congratulations to your PhD! And now: may you make good use of it! By that I mean: may you not cheat either yourself or your students. Because, unless I?m very much mistaken, that?s what will be expected from you."

"Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree."

"Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?"

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

"Don?t think, but look!"

"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one."

"'Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept."

"Don't regard a hesitant assertion as an assertion of hesitancy."

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

"Don't look for the meanings; look for the use."

"Don't think, but look!"

"Each sentence that I write is trying to say the whole thing, that is, the same thing over and over again and it is as though they were views of one object seen from different angles."

"Elementary propositions consist of names."

"Ethics and aesthetics are one."

"Everything is already there in.... How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? ? "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." ? That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it."

"Every explanation is after all an hypothesis."

"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly."

"Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

"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?"

"For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

"For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered."

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

"He who lives in the present lives in eternity."

"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 remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules."

"Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life."

"For I know that queer things happen in this world. It's one of the few things I've really learnt in my life."

"Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors."

"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."

"Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves."

"God is, how things stand."

"Golden is a surface color."

"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden. He says again and again, I know that that?s a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them, This fellow isn?t insane. We are only doing philosophy."

"I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings."

"How things stand, is God."

"Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it."

"Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important."

"I am my world. (The microcosm.)"

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

"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."