Ludwig Wittgenstein on Mind

"What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within."

"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."

"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."

"It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems."

"Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint."

"Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels."

"I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever."

"The thought is the significant proposition."

"Schiller writes in a letter of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself."

"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."

"Don't say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!"

"What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it."