Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.
A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?
This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
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?
I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.
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.
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.
The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.
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.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
It is obvious that an imagined # world , however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.
Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
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.
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, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.
A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.
You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.
A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.
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.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain