192 quotes
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
Culture and Value (1980)
One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice.
(Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.
Culture and Value (1980)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
There is really only one world soul [Weltseele], which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others.
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
But ordinary language is all right.
The Blue Book (1931)
Does man think because he has found that thinking pays?
Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
The world is all that is the case.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.
Culture and Value (1980)
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.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.
Culture and Value (1980)