31 Quotes About Wittgenstein

Prior to taking up philosophy I had spent half a decade as an art student and I am quite sure that what persuaded me of the importance and veracity of these ancient ideas was my art school education. For art making is all about discerning and creating structures. When later, as a philosophy student, I read Wittgenstein’s instruction to attend to the differences, I heard an echo of the art teacher’s command to look at the gaps between objects and draw them also.

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all

Wittgenstein likes to assert: "Whereof we cannot speak we must be silent". But skilfully using our hands and manipulating our thoughts can be plausible options to make ourselves understood. So, if we can’t say it, we can show and depict it. Whereof we cannot speak we can paint! ("Happy days are back again")

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

What Wittgenstein points the way toward here is the possibility of appreciating how (what we, under the pressure of certain philosophical assumptions, are prone to conceive of as) our 'merely' animal capacities are not merely animal. Even those capacities that we are inclined to view as beloning to our 'merely' animal being - capacities such as walking, eating, drinking, and playing - come to be transformed through and through in the lives of the sorts of creatures we are: ones who speak.

But doesn't it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)