- Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
- Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.
- Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
- If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
- What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
- If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
- You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
- 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.
- There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
- Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments. The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness. 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 problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.
- People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them and poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
- Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.
- If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.
- Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
feb 22 2014 ∞
mar 10 2014 +