Quotes About Wittgenstein

We are led into philosophical confusion, thought Wittgenstein, by seeking explanations at times when we should instead simply stop and say, "This is how things are.

He was of the opinion... that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men. { Von Wright on his tutor, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein }

La gente no suele saber aplicar la filosofía. Dudo de que ni siquiera los filósofos sepan hacerlo. —La gente puede usar conceptos morales lo mismo que tú has usado ahora el concepto de la verdad para convencerme. Cualquiera puede hacerlo. —Quizá. Pero creo que la filosofía moral es algo que resulta desesperanzadamente personal. No puede ser comunicado. «Si un león hablase, no podríamos comprenderlo», ha dicho Wittgenstein.

If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.' Wittgenstein. I don't think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!

Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter.

Even Wittgenstein did not think that we would ever reach the moon.

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all?

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that's what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …

The meaning of the world, said Wittgenstein, is outside the world. Events and values are distinguishable only in relation to others. A totality of events and values, the world itself, requires another.

Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.

That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." At the time I had not read Wittgenstein

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism.

It is why God created matter, most of all the human body, which has the greatest power to make spirit visible. (Thus the philosopher Wittgenstein, asked what a human soul could possibly look like, answered, "Like a human body.")

Very possibly this was what was in Wittgenstein's own mind all of those years later, in face, when he said that you do no need a lot of money to give a nice present, but you do needs a lot of time.

The mistake, Wittgenstein argued, is in thinking philosophy can answer these questions. It comes partly from a flawed view of language that insists that if a word has meaning, there must be a thing attached to that meaning. The philosopher asks, 'What is reality?', 'What is justice?' or 'What is the mind?' and then goes looking with logic for the identity of that thing – and of course can't find it, because they are just words.

In his many remarks on mathematics, Wittgenstein is concerned to show the delusiveness of this picture. For when we reflect on it, we forget that we are looking at a projection of our own decisions and their consequences.

But in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with Ben Richards, an undergraduate student of medicine at Cambridge who was nearly forty years younger than him; this relationship brought him great joy and continued until his death.

Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930s on he became clear that philosophy was a - a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practised it that way.

Wittgenstein sent the Tractatus to several publishers who rejected it, including his own university press — Cambridge, which was to distinguish itself by rejecting all his writing.

So Wittgenstein went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study under Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who was a lecturer in mathematical logic. This was to lead to a passionate intellectual friendship between these two great philosophers in which both were transformed.

Cum spunea Wittgenstein, nu sunt posibile miracole în lume, singurul miracol este însuÈ™i faptul c? lumea exist?.