Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?
Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world – I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
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 European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.
What a curious attitude scientists have: “We still don’t know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!”’ As if that went without saying.
There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a “proposition” is a position in the game of language.
Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.
The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.
In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.
The World and Life are one.
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 as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.
The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.
We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
Es ist offenbar, dass auch eine von der wirklichen noch so verschieden gedachte Welt Etwas – eine Form – mit der wirklichen gemein haben muss.
We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.
Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.
But doesn’t it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?