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Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

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
Formation
Concepts
Teach
Lasts
Last
Understand
Nothing
Fictional
Important

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Suppose we think while we talk or write--I mean, as we normally do--we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression.
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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.
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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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If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.
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A confession has to be part of your new life.
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The world is made up of facts, not things.
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One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.
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Elementary propositions consist of names.
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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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So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
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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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You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself
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Language disguises thought.
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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.
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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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Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.
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