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When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly .

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
Choose
Blindly
Obey
Rule

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Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.
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What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.
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There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.
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One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense.
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One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.
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Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
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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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Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.
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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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Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
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Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept.
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To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.
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One age misunderstands another and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
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The world divides into facts.
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For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
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It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given. This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.
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A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.
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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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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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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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