Quote

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.

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
Savages
Spiritual
Practices
Matter
Primitive
Englishman
Much
Explanation
Explanations
Meaning
Englishmen
Century
Twentieth
Savage
Practice
Removed
Understanding

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Ethics and aesthetics are one.
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In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
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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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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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That the world is, is the mystical.
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Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.
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In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
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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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All mathematics is tautology.
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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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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.
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And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
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We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
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A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
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You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.
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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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Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.
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Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.
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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.
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With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.
Ludwig Wittgenstein