Ludwig Wittgenstein - Culture and Value

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Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. And no more is every building designed for a purpose architecture.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
As long as I continue to come across questions in more remote regions which I can't answer, it is understandable that I should still not be able to find my way around regions that are less remote. For how do I know that what stands in the way of an answer here is not precisely what is preventing me from clearing away the fog over there?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Sometimes you see the idea in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort.

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
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Fare well!"
"A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

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
Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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?

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

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
A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye.
For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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