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An entire mythology is stored within our language.

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
Stored
Mythology
Entire
Within
Language

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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Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The world divides into facts.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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All mathematics is tautology.
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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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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One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.
Ludwig Wittgenstein