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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Image
The world divides into facts.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
A confession has to be part of your new life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
The face is the soul of the body.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
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
Image
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
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
Image
Language disguises the thought so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
I am my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Image
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
Image
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