Quotes About Reality

T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

Tell me, Wittgenstein's asked a friend, why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating? His friend replied, Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. Wittgenstein replied, Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

If there were a verb meaning to believe falsely, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.

The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.

There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

The world is independent of my will.

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