Quotes About Language

Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)

But doesn't it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given

To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an illogical world would look like.

Los límites de mi lenguaje son los límites de mi mente. Sólo conozco aquello para lo que tengo palabras.

Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.

The limits of my language means the limit of my world

Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

A main source of our failure to understand is that we don't have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'. … The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a 'Weltanschauung'?)

The "experience" which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience.   Logic precedes every experience—that something is so.   It is before the How, not before the What.

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

Me siento inclinado a decir que la expresión lingüística correcta del milagro de la existencia del mundo -a pesar de no ser una proposición en el lenguaje- es la existencia del lenguaje mismo

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

The same operation which makes "q" from "p", makes "r" from "q", and so on. This can only be expressed by the fact that "p", "q", "r", etc., are variables which give general expression to certain formal relations.

Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

Our motto might be: Let us not be bewitched.

A particular method of symbolizing may be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing. And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.

If we hear a Chinese we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot recognize the human being in someone etc.

Das Spiel des Zweifelns selbst setzt schon die Gewißheit voraus.

The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming vacuous. — We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!