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I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.

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
Like
Pencil
Pencils
Glasses
Philosophy
Looking
Woman
Firsts
First

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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.
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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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Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!
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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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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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What is thinkable is also possible.
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The face is the soul of the body.
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We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
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Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: Let's have done with it now, and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.
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Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.
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Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it.
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A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
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I am my world.
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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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We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.
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The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
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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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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.
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What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
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All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
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