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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

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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
Common
Puzzles
Sense
Philosophers
Attacks
Defend
Temptation
Attack
Philosopher
Curing
Philosophical
Solving

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Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.
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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.
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The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.
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Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
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The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
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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.
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Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
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If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
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A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
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A picture is a model of reality.
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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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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.
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Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.
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At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
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The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.
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It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given. This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.
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It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
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The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.
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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.
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