Quotes About Language

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

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.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

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

11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.--What does that mean? What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.

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 solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. ... (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)

There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a proposition is a position in the game of language.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.

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

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.

Es ist offenbar, dass auch eine von der wirklichen noch so verschieden gedachte Welt Etwas -- eine Form -- mit der wirklichen gemein haben muss.

We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don't get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.