Quotes About Perspective

Only one who has known how troubled life can be, has a real appreciation of it when it is good

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

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?

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

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

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

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.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

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.

What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

Indeed how might it be if things revealed their colors only when (in our terms) no light fell on them - if, for example, the sky were black? Could we not then say, only by black light do they appear to us in their full colors?

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.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. It is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, but that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

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.

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.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion

A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.

What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.

Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.