Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

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The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Does man think because he has found that thinking pays?
Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

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