Wiitgenstein

• Anyone who listens to a child's crying and understands what he hears will know that it harbours dormant psychic forces, terrible forces different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain, and lust for destruction. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feel like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this 'solution' had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has not been discovered seems fortuitious in relation to how things were then.
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Man has to awaken to wonder-and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any.
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Kleist wrote somewhere that what the poet would most of all like to be able to do would be to convey thoughts by themselves without words. (What a strange admission.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Nothing we do can be defended absolutely and finally. But only by reference to something else that is not questioned. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Perhaps the inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Working in philosophy-like work in architecture in many respects-is really more a working on oneself. ON one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Ramsey was a borgeois thinker. I.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state-or at least he did not like doing so-but on how this state might be reasonably organized. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one in part disquieted him and in part bored him.
[Substitute Rawlsians for Ramsey] [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

What I do think essential is carrying out the work of clarification with COURAGE; otherwise it becomes just a clever game. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The delight I take in my thoughts is delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living? [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Don't play with what lies deep in another person! [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

I think I summed up my attitude towards philosophy when I said philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

the edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

language-I want to say-is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I could either have to go mad or change myself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

And it could say something to me only if I lived completely differently. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

a philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

people are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect as ill. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Christianity is not based on historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life...there is nothing paradoxical about that! [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
This message (the Gosepls) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly).
And it could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

You must say something new and yet it must all be old. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

'thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for." [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

In a scientific perspective a new use is justified by a theory. And if this theory is false, the new extended use has to be given up. But in philosophy the extended use does not rest on true or false beliefs about natural processes. No fact justifies it. None can give it any support. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

wanting to think is one thing; having a talent for thinking another. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

that man will be revolutionary who can revolutionize himself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Hate between men comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don't want anyone else to look inside us, since it's not a pretty sight in there.
Of course you must continue to feel ashamed of what's inside you, but not ashamed of yourself before your fellow-men. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

For if a man feels lost, that is the ultimate torment. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The human being is the best picture of the human soul. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

A hero looks death in the face, real death, no just the image of death. Behaving honourably...means rather being able to look death itself in the eye. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

One of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (or the direction of your life.)
Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned round. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The truly apocalypitc view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absured, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion.) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Wisdom is grey. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superflous. (for this reason I could never found a school.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

It strikes me that religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence although its belief, it's really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Bach said that all his achievement were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength.
Endurance of suffering isn't rated highly because there is supposed not to be any suffering-really it's out of date. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

The 'cussedness' of things is a stupid anthropomorphism. Because the truth is much graver than this fiction. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength... [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

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

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.
It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete a tete. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

It is difficult to know something and to act as if you did not know it. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems....
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

I should like to say that in this case too the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life.
Practice gives the words their sense. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Perhaps one could 'convince someone that God exists' by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the 'existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts....Experiences, thoughts, -life can force this concept on us. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]

So if you want to stay within the religious sphere you must struggle. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]