If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday
Language disguises thought.
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
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