"Aim at being loved without being admired."
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Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes (page 3 of 18)
347 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now sixty two years old, yet just one moment ago I realised that I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread."
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"Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again."
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"Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep."
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"Only describe, don't explain."
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"This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time."
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"Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."
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"I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink."
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"My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense."
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"If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I."
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"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open."
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"A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view."
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"Don't look for the meanings; look for the use."
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"What is thinkable is also possible."
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"Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries."
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"We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation."
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"It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him."
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"The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it."
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"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."
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"If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."
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