“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.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183
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Ludwig Wittgenstein228
Austrian-British philosopher 1889–1951Related quotes
Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §1 (p. 52)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
Context: No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.
“You are seeking a knot in a bulrush.”
Menæchmi, Act II, sc. 1, line 22; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). A proverbial expression implying a desire to create doubts and difficulties where there really were none. It occurs in Terence, the "Andria", act v. sc. 4, 38; also in Ennius, "Saturæ", 46.
Menaechmi (The Brothers Menaechmus)
Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts
Quoted in Dionne, E. J., The Washington Post, (16 November 2004)]
Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer
The Rubaiyat (1120)
“He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.”
William Gibson book Pattern Recognition
Source: Pattern Recognition
“Strongest of Oak is the gallows
Tighest of knots is the noose”
Hoyt Axton (1938–1999) American country singer
"Strongest of Oak" (1965) · Performance on Bonanza http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OXY6rsAIDk <br class="br">Context: Strongest of Oak is the gallows<br>Tighest of knots is the noose<br>Why oh why did I kill that man<br>Now I'll never get loose
“God huddles in a knot in every cell of flesh.”
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: God huddles in a knot in every cell of flesh.
When I break a fruit open, this is how every seed is revealed to me. When I speak to men, this what I discern in their thick and muddy brains.
God struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light. What light? Beyond and above every thing!