Great Throughts Treasury

"I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!"

"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."

"I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another."

"I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false."

"I obey the rule blindly."

"I never believed in God before. ?That I understand. But not: I never really believed in Him before."

"I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got...What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?"

"I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again."

"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."

"I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever."

"I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment."

"I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink."

"I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition."

"I want to say: We use judgments as principles of judgment."

"Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out."

"I would like to say ?This book is written to the glory of God?, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them."

"I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)"

"If a blind man were to ask me Have you got two hands? I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don?t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn?t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what?"

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

"If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained."

"If all objects are given, then thereby are all possible atomic facts also given. Everything is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space."

"If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."

"If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud."

"If for example two propositions ?p? and ?q? give a tautology in the connection ?p q?, then it is clear that q follows from p. E.g. that ?q? follows from ?p q : p? we see from these two propositions themselves, but we can also show it by combining them to ?p q:p :: q? and then showing that this is a tautology."

"If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it?s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit."

"If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do.""

"If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of."

"If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense."

"If I wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was this punch that I originally wanted."

"If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same.""

"If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness."

"If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors."

"If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time."

"If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day."

"If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I."

"If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false."

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

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

"If there were theses in philosophy, they would have to be such that they do not give rise to disputes. For they would have to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. As long as there is a possibility of having different opinions and disputing about a question, this indicates that things have not yet been expressed clearly enough. Once perfectly clear formulation ? ultimate clarity ? has been reached, there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these always arise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do not yet know whether I should admit it or not. If, however, you make the grammar clear to yourself, if you proceed by very short steps in such a way that every single step becomes perfectly obvious and natural, no dispute whatsoever can arise. Controversy always arises through leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed."

"If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest."

"If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."

"If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?"

"If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings."

"If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields."

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

"I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again."

"Improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world."

"Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.'"

"In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing."

"In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)."