Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Well, what does "good" mean anyway? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation."

I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

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

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes 'forms of life ' for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.

All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.

The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

Was it a game of #UCL or was Messi in a Play Station game? Impossible! If he scores 6 goals, can he take home 2 balls?

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty clothes of everyday, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance of others, by expressing in the world of forms- truth, love, purity and beauty - this is the sole game which has any intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments can, in themselves, have no lasting importance.

Philosophy by showing - including philosophy in literature - does truly valuable work in leading us to new perspectives from which our arguments can then begin. It does so by introducing new synthetic complexes, which we then reflect on from various points of view. When the complexes survive and grow, that initial showing has been philosophically decisive.

Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

It'sthe fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.