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Philosophy
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The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Photography
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Prison
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A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Problems
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Progress
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Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Relationships
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...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
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Religion
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Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Science
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Silence
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Snow
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, journal entry; Culture and Value (ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, 1980), 1939-40
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Superiority
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If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Thought
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Tragedy
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You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Truth
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One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Understanding
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Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Wisdom
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It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Words
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A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Books by and about Ludwig Wittgenstein