Ludwig Wittgenstein - Point Quotes

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Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.
You say : The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that 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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein