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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

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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
Everything
Lies
Nothing
View
Views
Philosophy
Open
Explains
Since
Puts
Lying
Explain
Anything
Neither

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
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Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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How small a thought it takes to fill a life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The depressed man lives in a depressed world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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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The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein