"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Death and Dying
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"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Debate
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"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Grammar
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"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Health
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"Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Humor
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"No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently -- and tolerantly -- to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Injury
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"You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Insanity
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"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Intelligence and Intellectuals
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"Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Knowledge
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"Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Language
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"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Language
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"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Lies and Lying
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"I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Life and Living
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"The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Logic
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"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Logic
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Meaning
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"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Philosophers and Philosophy
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"It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Philosophers and Philosophy
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Philosophers and Philosophy
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"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Philosophers and 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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Philosophers and Philosophy
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Photography
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Prison
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Problems
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"It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Procreation
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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"

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Progress
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Religion
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"For a truly religious man nothing is tragic."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Religion
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Science and Scientists
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"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Silence
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"There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Speech
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"Our greatest stupidities may be very wise."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Stupidity
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Catholicism
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"If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Certainty
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Superiority
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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."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Thoughts and Thinking
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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)."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Thoughts and Thinking
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"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Tragedies
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"One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Truth
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"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on Vocabulary
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