Great Throughts Treasury

"Music conveys to us itself!"

"My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul."

"My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn?t live much longer."

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

"My difficulty is only an ? enormous ? difficulty of expression."

"My father was a businessman and I am a businessman too; I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled."

"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"

"My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one."

"No part of our experience is also a priori. Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori."

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."

"Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony."

"Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones."

"Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own."

"Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?"

"My method consists essentially in leaving aside the question of truth and asking about sense instead."

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

"One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice."

"One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage."

"Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them."

"One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature."

"One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word ?philosophy? there must be a second ? order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word ?orthography? among others without then being second ? order."

"One must always be prepared to learn something totally new."

"One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches."

"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"

"One of the earliest historical instances of the ?dialogic? [...] is Socratic irony; and it is interesting that this is in some sense too the implicit genre of Wittgenstein?s Investigations. The Investigations are a voice in dialogue with itself and an implied other, digressing and doubling back, so that the reader is not supplied with ready-made truth as in the monologism of a Russell, but invited to share in the unfoldings, quickenings and arrestings of the discursive process, with its jokes, aphorisms, unanswered questions, parables, exclamations and wonderings aloud. ? Terry Eagleton"

"One of the most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the reader says, ?Yes, that?s exactly the way I meant it?. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error. Indeed we can only convict someone else of a mistake if he acknowledges that this really is the expression of his feeling? For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression."

"One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is."

"Only describe, don't explain."

"Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw."

"Our civilization is characterized by the word ?progress?. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated structure. And even clarity is only a means to this end and not an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, transparency, is an end in itself I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me. So I am aiming at something different than are the scientists and my thoughts move differently than do theirs."

"Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious."

"Our craving for generality has [as one] source? our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is purely descriptive."

"Our greatest stupidities may be very wise."

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

"Our interest does not fall back upon these causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history ? since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes."

"Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language."

"Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color."

"People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in."

"People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them ? that does not occur to them."

"Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?'."

"Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning."

"Our only task is to be just. That is, we must only point out and resolve the injustices of philosophy, and not posit new parties ? and creeds."

"Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness."

"Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" ? It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?"

"Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it."

"Philosophical problems are not solved by experience, for what we talk about in philosophy are not facts but things for which facts are useful. Philosophical trouble arises through seeing a system of rules and seeing that things do not fit it. It is like advancing and retreating from a tree stump and seeing different things. We go nearer, remember the rules, and feel satisfied, then retreat and feel dissatisfied."

"Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments. The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness."

"Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?"

"Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer."

"Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries."