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What can be shown, cannot be said.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Age: 62 †
Born: 1889
Born: April 26
Died: 1951
Died: April 29
Aphorist
Architectural Theoretician
Epistemologist
Logician
Mathematician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Language
Professor
Teacher
Vienna
Austria
Shown
Philosophical
Cannot

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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When philosophers use a word--knowledge, being, object, I, proposition, name--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The world is made up of facts, not things.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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All mathematics is tautology.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein