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"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."
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"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."

"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."

"Assumptions can be dangerous, JUST ASK!!"

"On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it."

"Was there ever something not known before it was recognized?"

"You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. "Ahh, how to be happy?"

"Readers who think I have answers when all I have are a few pointed questions."
Explore more quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

"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.""

"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."

"Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again."

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

"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."

"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing."
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