Quotes About Meaning

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.

6.4311 Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.

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.

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?

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.

Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident.

La Ética, en tanto surge del deseo de decir algo acerca del significado último de la vida, del bien absoluto, de lo absolutamente valioso, no puede ser una ciencia. Lo que dice no le agrega nada a nuestro conocimiento en ningún sentido. Pero es un testimonio de una tendencia de la mente humana que yo, personalmente, no puedo si no respetar profundamente y que no ridiculizaría jamás, aunque mi vida dependiera de ello

What we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.

What the names signify must be indestructible; for it must be possible to receive a state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning. I must not saw off the branch on which I am sitting.

What can be described can happen too: and what the law of causality is meant to exclude cannot even be described.

O ?em není možno mluvit, o tom se musí ml?et.

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.

That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still

Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless.

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

If Ave say Plato loves Socrates, the word loves which occurs between the word Plato and the word Socrates establishes a certain relation between these two words, and it is owing to this fact that our sentence is able to assert a relation between the person's name by the words Plato and Socrates. We must not say, the complex sign ' a R b' says 'a stands in a certain relation R to b' ; but we must say, that ' a' stands in a certain relation to 'b' says that a R b (3.1432)• Mr