Quotes About Understanding

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

Commenting on his Tractatus...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

What a curious attitude scientists have: "We still don't know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!"' As if that went without saying.

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.--What does that mean? What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?

What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a proposition is a position in the game of language.

Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: I wish you luck. I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me. And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.

Es ist offenbar, dass auch eine von der wirklichen noch so verschieden gedachte Welt Etwas -- eine Form -- mit der wirklichen gemein haben muss.

We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don't get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.

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

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

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

The limits of my language means the limit of my world

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'?)