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What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

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
Terms
Lead
Term
Undefined
Definition
Definitions
Gain
Gains

More quotes by 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.
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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 we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
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Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.
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There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.
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One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
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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.
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The depressed man lives in a depressed world.
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The world divides into facts.
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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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A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
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The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
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A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein