Quote collection
347 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one."
"Wishing is not acting. But willing is acting."
"Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."
"There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point."
"At the end of reasons comes persuasion."
"What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things."
"Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color."
"Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic."
"Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?"
"Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels."
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things"
"To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique."
"A logical picture of facts is a thought."
"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."
"And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life."
"People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it."
"It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it."
"What makes a subject difficult to understand if it is significant, important is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will."
"Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday"
"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."