Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

The major problem for us in the 21st century is to be comfortable with ambiguity.

I think, when I meet a person, in general, it's not my habit to conclude anything about people. Not completely. Even people you know well constantly remain open.

Coyote never loses. Because I change the rules of the games my enemies play. What are the rules of your game?

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.

The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like... Just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we're still going to live in a world that's older and more complicated than we'll ever understand.

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem.

You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.

I think sometimes people haven't really quite worked out how to peg me, or exactly what it is that I do. In that way, I feel lucky that I can get to play different things because they haven't quite decided what I am.

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet possibly finite, card game. Image combinations, permutations, comprise the world game.

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

Most people believe they have a clear idea of what's right and wrong. Many say they know how they'll act, or how they'll handle an extreme situation. But to be honest, no one knows. Not reallyBecause none of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong.

I'm aware that at the big, big clubs stuff can change quickly, as can opinions and people in charge. Not everyone is going to like you, not everyone is going to want to play you and that's the business side of it, which I've grown into and I'm certainly not going to take personally.

It's a game. We tax lawyers teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich-and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

Most people, no matter what they do, they don't think they're a bad person. The place where their actions are coming from is a complicated place and a whole personal history. I definitely think that it helped me to look at the world a little less judgmentally.