Ray Monk > Quotes

“To do the job which you’ve got really well; so well that you don’t lose your self-respect doing it’:”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“But how did you become devoted to the King who had done all this?’ Sudarshana asks. When did this change of feeling take place? ‘I couldn’t tell you’, comes the reply: I don’t know myself. A day came when all the rebel in me knew itself beaten, and then my whole nature bowed down in humble resignation in the dust. And then I saw … I saw that he was as incomparable in beauty as he was in terror. I was saved, I was rescued.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“the imagination to see, the strength to achieve, and an absolutely incorruptible moral integrity’.”
― Ray Monk, Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Wittgenstein was very much against women's suffrage for no particular reason except that 'all women he knows are such idiots'.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Harold F. Cherniss, who was a doctoral student in classics at Berkeley when he met Oppenheimer in 1929, remarked: “The more intimately I was acquainted with him, the less I knew about him.” Oppenheimer, Cherniss thought, “wanted friends very much,” but “he didn’t know how to make friends.” Oppenheimer may not”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“It is perhaps indicative of how hard it was in Harvard during the 1920s for a Jew—even a Jew as wealthy, as American and as un-Jewish as Oppenheimer—to mix with gentiles that his closest friend at the college was someone”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“Tautologies, according to Wittgenstein, are senseless, because, as they do not picture the world, they lack sense.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“is an indication of the impact Oppenheimer made on Edsall that the title he chose was one suggested to him by Oppenheimer: The Gad-Fly. This was an allusion to Socrates’s description of himself in Plato’s Apology as a gadfly whose role in society was “to sting people, and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.” Eagerly embracing this image, Edsall, in his editorial for the first issue, published in December 1922, announced:”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“meaningful propositions are limited to picturing states of affairs in the world, and value,”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Everything in the world can be pictured, but a picture cannot represent its own pictorial form; this has to be shown rather than said.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions ‘pseudo-propositions’; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.”
― Ray Monk, How To Read Wittgenstein

“Dirac was not impressed by Oppenheimer’s knowledge of and interest in literature. On the contrary, he rather disapproved of it. Once he remarked to Oppenheimer: “I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center