Ludwig Wittgenstein - Culture and Value

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Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice.
(Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently - and tolerantly - to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

Ludwig Wittgenstein