Quotes About Philosophy

Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.

I want to say: We use judgements as principlesof judegement.

The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.

Indeed how might it be if things revealed their colors only when (in our terms) no light fell on them - if, for example, the sky were black? Could we not then say, only by black light do they appear to us in their full colors?

Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up What's that? - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: this is a man, this is a house, etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression.

Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

The atmosphere surrounding this problem is terrible. Dense clouds of language lie about the crucial point. It is almost impossible to get through to it.

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

Commenting on his Tractatus...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....

303. I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am.—Yes: one can make the decision to say I believe he is in pain instead of He is in pain. But that is all.——What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one. Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else's fear or pain.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?

What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.