Philosophy Quotes

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

"Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity."

"The subject does not belong to the world; rather, the subject is a limit of the world."

"To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life."

"The individual human being is the most interesting object of study which psychology has to work with."

"Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked."

"Philosophy leaves everything as it is."

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to."

"What a curious thing to say, that ethics cannot be put into words."

"A name means an object. The object is the meaning of the name."

"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. This is the true philosophy."

"The facts all come together in logical space."

"It is our certainty, not our knowledge, that needs philosophy."

"In the actual use of expressions we fall short of the old language-game forms."

"The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness."

"The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game."

"Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language."

"A question has only as much sense as its answer."

"The facts all settle themselves in the logical space."

"It is the tradition to which the word belongs that gives it its meaning."

"Speech and silence. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered, the riddle of life remains completely untouched."

"Introspection is a method so unreliable that I question its scientific validity entirely."

"We are all machines in a sense—but magnificent machines capable of endless learning and adaptation."

"Thought itself is nothing but implicit behavior—internalized stimulus-response patterns."

"The novelty of experience fades through habituation; consciousness itself is a habit formation process."

"We must stop asking 'why' in the philosophical sense and start asking 'how' in the mechanistic sense."

"We are not just passive receptors of the social world but active agents interpreting and responding to it."

"In reflecting on these experiments, we must confront the reality that ordinary circumstances can produce extraordinary moral failures."

"The main interest of my work is not the treatment of neuroses but the understanding of human nature."