Zettel Quotes

“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.--What does that mean?
What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“Our motto might be: "Let us not be bewitched".”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; … I mean this: if I talk or write, there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the center. Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the following—certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced—but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes out of it—this can only be done from the history of the seed. So an organism might come into being out of something quite amorphous, as it were, causelessly; and there is no reason why this should not really hold for our thoughts, and hence for our talking and writing.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“»Gott kannst du nicht mit einem Andern reden hören, sondern nur, wenn du der Angeredete bist.« – Das ist eine grammatische Bemerkung.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel