Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of ourmost accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

...science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.

Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

There is nothing new about humanism. It is the yielding to Satan's first temptation of Adam and Eve: "Ye shall be as gods." (Gen. 3:5)

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.