Quote

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.

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
Elementary
Shown
None
Necessary
Impossible
Sense
Given
Prop
Even
Props

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One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
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We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
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What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
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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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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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Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.
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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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You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.
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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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Black seems to make a colour cloudy, but darkness doesn't. A ruby could thus keep getting darker without ever becoming cloudy but if it became blackish red, it would become cloudy.
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You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.
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If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
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The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
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I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
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Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it.
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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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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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Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
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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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