W. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs. He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair — he has just the sort of rage when he can't understand things as I have.

He lives in the same kind of tense excitement as I do, hardly able to sit still or read a book. He was talking about Beethoven — how a friend described going to Beethoven's door and hearing him 'cursing and howling and singing' over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and had eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage. That's the sort of man to be.

The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.

There are two great men in history with whom he [Wittgenstein] somewhat resembles. One was Pascal, other was Tolstoy. Pascal was a mathematician of genius, but abandoned mathematics for piety. Tolstoy sacrificed his genius as a writer to a kind of bogus humility which made him prefer peasants to educated men and Uncle Tom's Cabin to all other works of fiction. Wittgenstein, who could play with metaphysical intricacies as cleverly as Pascal with Hexagons or Tolstoy with emperors, threw away this talent and debased himself before the peasants — in each case from an impulse of pride. I admired Wittgenstein's Tractatus but not his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.... [M]ental torments which made him and Pascal and Tolstoy pardonable in spite of their treachery to their own greatness.

As far as I know, Whitehead never read Wittgenstein. He told me, however, of an encounter with Wittgenstein which was entirely characteristic of the man and may interest you.The Whiteheads, at my suggestion, invited Wittgenstein for a social tea. Wittgenstein came and, as was his wont, began to silently pace back and forth across the room. Finally, he declared, "A proposition has two poles; they are apb." Naturally enough. Whitehead enquired, "What are a and b?" "They," replied Wittgenstein with some solemnity, "are indefinable."

The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. [...] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided.

Wittgenstein was basically unscientific. He knew that science was partly driven by a desire to generalize, and he rejected generalization. Scientific questions were of no great interest to him; they merely addressed the working of the natural world. Wittgenstein spent much of his later life examining the way in which language may shape our reality. This is not a subject that is irrelevant to science.

The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them to scientific findings, is called naturalism. Many philosophers since Plato have scorned naturalism, arguing that science cannot provide answers to the deepest philosophical questions, especially ones that concern not just how the world is but how it ought to be. They think that philosophy should reach conclusions that are true a priori, which means that they are prior to sensory experiences and can be gained by reason alone. Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to find any undisputed a priori truths. The absence of generally accepted a priori principles shows that the distinguished Platonic philosophical tradition of looking for them has failed. Wisdom must be sought more modestly.Sometimes, however, philosophy gets too modest. The highly influential Austrian/British philosopher Wittgenstein asserted that philosophy is unlike science in that all it should aim for is conceptual clarification. In his early writings, he looked to formal logic to provide the appropriate tools, and in his later work he emphasized attention to ordinary language. He claimed that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.” Much of twentieth-century philosophy in English devoted itself to the modest goal of merely clarifying existing concepts. But no one has learned much from analyzing the logic or the ordinary use of the words “wise” and “wisdom.” We need a theory of wisdom that can tell us what is important and why it is important. Such theorizing requires introducing new concepts and rejecting or modifying old ones.

[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.

[https://www.magicalquote.com/40-reasoning-ludwig-wittgenstein-quotes/ 40 Reasoning Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes]

Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent.”

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean.

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Worte sind Taten.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

In Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

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 would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)