MondayJan 05, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
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.
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.
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 seldom sought.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
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.
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
Don't regard a hesitant assertion as an assertion of hesitancy.
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.
Don't think: Look!
A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
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.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
The world is made up of facts, not things.
This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one.
The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
... for I know that queer things happen in this world. It's one of the few things I've really learnt in my life.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
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.
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.
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
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.
There can never be surprises in logic.
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently and tolerantly to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.
The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul....
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
The world is everything that is the case.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
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