Quote

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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
Doubt
Games
Anything
Everything
Presupposes
Would
Doubting
Certainty
Tried
Game

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A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
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Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.
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The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
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We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.
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Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
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If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
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At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
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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.
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Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.
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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.
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If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.
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If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.
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Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
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We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Suppose someone follows the series 1,3,5,7, .., and in writing the series 2x+1 and he asked himself But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time? If from one day to the next someone promises: Tomorrow I will give up smoking, does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?
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It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
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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.
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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