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Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

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
Words
Characterized
Use
Hammer
Think
Glue
Thinking
Hammers
Square
Pot
Squares
Chisel
Instruments
Chisels

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The face is the soul of the body.
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Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.
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Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
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The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.
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Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.
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The world divides into facts.
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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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In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.
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In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
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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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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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To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning.
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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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I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.
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We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
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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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The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
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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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Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.
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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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