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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.

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
Philosophy
Critique
Though
Performed
Language
Apparent
Sense
Propositions
Form
Showing
Need
Logical
Real
Philosophical
Russell
Needs
Service
Proposition

More quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.
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The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
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You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.
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Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
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People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.
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An entire mythology is stored within our language.
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A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
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A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.
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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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I am my world.
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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
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The world is made up of facts, not things.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
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The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
Ludwig Wittgenstein