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?
I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.
471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.
2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. 2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. 2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true.
The same operation which makes “q” from “p”, makes “r” from “q”, and so on. This can only be expressed by the fact that “p”, “q”, “r”, etc., are variables which give general expression to certain formal relations.
Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant – so that he constantly called different things by that name – but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’ – in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.
A particular method of symbolizing may be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing. And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.
The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice.
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.
The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.
It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.
What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.
The war saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.
Let us not forget this: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.
Our motto might be: “Let us not be bewitched”.
Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident.
Haven’t I made the elementary mistake of confusing one’s thoughts with one’s knowledge.
That is incorrect, but something right is hidden behind it.