Friday, May 04, 2007

Like eating chocolate covered coffee beans

Stop when the trembling is uncontrollable:

"If art serves 'to arouse feelings' is, perhaps, perceiving it with the senses to be included amongs those feelings?"

"An example that shows how monstrously vain wishes are is the wish I have to fill a nice notebook with writing as quickly as possible. I get nothing at all from this; I don't wish it because, say, it will be evidence of my productivity; it is no more than a craving to rid myself of something familiar as soon as I can; although as soon as I have got rid of it I shall have to start a fresh one and the whole business will have to be repeated."

"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."

"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 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.)

"It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

"The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription.--But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction.--(I.e., this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned around.
Wisdom is passionless. But faith, by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion."

"People nowadays thinks that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them--that does not occur to them."

"In religion every level of discourse must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.

For instance, at my level the Pauline doctrine of predestination is ugly nonsense, irreligiousness. Hence it is not suitable for me, since the only use I could make of the picture I am offered would be a wrong one. If it is a good and godly picture, then it is so for someone at a quite different level, who must use it in his life in a way completely different from anything that would be possible for me."

"Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, tr. Peter Winch

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