Quotes About Understanding

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

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.

So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing. [Es ist die große Täuschung der Moderne, dass die Naturgesetze uns die Welt erklären. Die Naturgesetze beschreiben die Welt, sie beschreiben die Gesetzmäßigkeiten. Aber sie erklären uns nichts.]

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

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