Quotes from Ray Monk

To do the job which you've got really well; so well that you don't lose your self-respect doing it':

Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.

Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.

But how did you become devoted to the King who had done all this?' Sudarshana asks. When did this change of feeling take place? 'I couldn't tell you', comes the reply: I don't know myself. A day came when all the rebel in me knew itself beaten, and then my whole nature bowed down in humble resignation in the dust. And then I saw … I saw that he was as incomparable in beauty as he was in terror. I was saved, I was rescued.

the imagination to see, the strength to achieve, and an absolutely incorruptible moral integrity'.

Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.

Wittgenstein was very much against women's suffrage for no particular reason except that 'all women he knows are such idiots'.

Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.

Tautologies, according to Wittgenstein, are senseless, because, as they do not picture the world, they lack sense.

Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions 'pseudo-propositions'; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.

Everything in the world can be pictured, but a picture cannot represent its own pictorial form; this has to be shown rather than said.

meaningful propositions are limited to picturing states of affairs in the world, and value

the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.