Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

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Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

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
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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
A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

Ludwig Wittgenstein
For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense....

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Ludwig Wittgenstein