97. We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound and essential to us in our investigation resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, inference, truth, experience, and so forth. This order is a super-order between — so to speak — super-concepts. Whereas, in fact, if the words “language”, “experience”, “world”, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”.

- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

(via philosophisdom)

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All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.

- Benedict de Spinoza

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact its nature.

- Gottfried Leibniz

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

- John Locke

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But Virtue owns no master: as a man honours and dishonours her, so shall he have more of her or less. The blame is his who chooses: Heaven is blameless.

- Plato, The Republic

As Wittgenstein says, “in order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit,” a truth to which Bradley gives a special twist in maintaining that the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is impossible is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of his own.

- Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth & Logic

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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

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