Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes .

105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

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.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?