Quote

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

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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
Come
Lines
False
Thing
Living
Carry
Something
Makes
Meaning
Psychical
Doesn
Paper
Arrow
True
Line
Arrows
Seems
Seem
Besides
Doe
Already
Application
Everything
Dead
Points

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.
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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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Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.
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When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote
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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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Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.
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There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
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What is thinkable is also possible.
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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.
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Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.
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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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An entire mythology is stored within our language.
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For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.
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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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You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
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The world divides into facts.
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Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain
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If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.
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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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