Great Throughts Treasury

"In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not."

"In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest?the one who crosses the finish line last."

"In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value."

"In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit."

"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?"

"In so far as people think they can see the limits of human understanding, they think of course that they can see beyond these."

"Is scientific progress useful for philosophy? Certainly. The realities that are discovered lighten the philosopher?s task, imagining possibilities."

"In what sense are laws of inference laws of thought? Can a reason be given for thinking as we do? Will this require an answer outside the game of reasoning? There are two senses of "reason": reason for, and cause. These are two different orders of things. One needs to decide on a criterion for something's being a reason before reason and cause can be distinguished. Reasoning is the calculation actually done, and a reason goes back one step in the calculus. A reason is a reason only inside the game."

"Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?"

"It is a strange coincidence that all the people whose skull has been opened had a brain."

"It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him."

"It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something -- a form -- in common with the real world."

"It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise."

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given."

"It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all."

"It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.."

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

"It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true."

"It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played."

"It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought."

"It is possible?indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic?to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic."

"It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world."

"It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him."

"It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English ? the best race in the world ? cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German."

"It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150 years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence."

"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.""

"It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of a?airs could be made to ?t. If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them."

"It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment."

"It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems."

"Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things. If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context."

"It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?"

"Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint."

"Just be independent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it."

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

"Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? ? Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?"

"Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized."

"Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it."

"Language disguises thought."

"Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental."

"Learning philosophy is really recollecting. We remember that we really used words in this way."

"Logic is not a theory but a re?ection of the world."

"Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic."

"Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, ?The world has this in it, and this, but not that.? For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either."

"Logic proceeds from premises just as physics does. But the primitive propositions of physics are results of very general experience, while those of logic are not. To distinguish between the propositions of physics and those of logic, more must be done than to produce predicates such as experiential and self-evident. It must be shown that a grammatical rule holds for one and not for the other."

"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

"Mathematics is a logical method ... Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics."

"Man is the microcosm:"

"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical."

"Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics."

"Mechanics is an attempt to construct according to a single plan all true propositions which we need for the description of the world."