Quotes About Understanding

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.

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 difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

Our motto might be: Let us not be bewitched.

If we hear a Chinese we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot recognize the human being in someone etc.

Das Spiel des Zweifelns selbst setzt schon die Gewißheit voraus.

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

We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the 'possibilities' of phenomena.

Another alternative would have been to give you what's called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don't understand, and to gratify what I believe to be on of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.

Los limites de mi lenguaje son los limites de mi mundo

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.

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

I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.

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 limits of my language are the limits of my universe

The world is my world: this is shown by the fact that the limits of language stand for the limits of my world…I am my world.

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

Ich möchte den Ausdruck ' Ich weiß ' für die Fälle reservieren , in denen er im normalen Sprachverkehr gebraucht wird.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Die Probleme werden gelöst, nicht durch Beibringen neuer Erfahrung, sondern durch Zusammenstellung des längst Bekannten. Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know