Quotes About Interpretation

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

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.

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.

Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.

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

Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.

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

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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.

Suppose that the colour struck you as brighter on one day than on another; would you sometimes say: I must be wrong, that colour is certainly the same as yesterday? This shews that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal.

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.

O fato de uma proposição poder revelar-se falsa depende, em última instância, daquilo que eu considerar como predominantes dessa proposição.

There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.

For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.

to be considered an important event in the philosophical world.

2.22 What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.

Ma che colpa abbiamo, io e voi, se le parole, per sè, sono vuote?...E voi le riempite del senso vostro, nel dirmele, e io nell'accoglierle, inevitabilmente, le riempio del senso mio. Abbiamo creduto d'intenderci, non ci siamo intesi affatto.

Abbiamo tutti dentro un mondo di cose: ciascuno un suo mondo di cose! E come possiamo intenderci, signore, se nelle parole ch'io dico metto il senso e il valore delle cose come sono dentro di me; mentre chi le ascolta, inevitabilmente le assume col senso e col valore che hanno per sé, del mondo com'egli l'ha dentro? Crediamo di intenderci; non ci intendiamo mai!

Una realtà non ci fu data e non c'è, dobbiamo farcela noi: non sarà mai una per tutti e per sempre ma di continuo e infinitamente mutabile.

But a fact is like a sack which won't stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which have caused it to exist.

Dalle vette nuvolose delle sue astrazioni il signor Anselmo lasciava spesso precipitar così, come valanghe, i suoi pensieri. La ragione, il nesso, l'opportunità di essi rimanevano lassù, tra le nuvole, dimodochè difficilmente a chi lo ascoltava riusciva di capirci qualche cosa.

But is it our fault, yours and mine, if words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear friend. You fill them with your meaning, as you speak them to me; while I, in taking them in, inevitably fill them with my own. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other at all.

reality is not a thing conferred upon us or which exists; it is something that we have to manufacture ourselves.