Passages about language and rhetoric

The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.

Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

I walk on air and contemplate the sun.

Zeus? What Zeus? There is no Zeus.

The country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do.

The greatest of goods come to us through madness, provided the madness is given by divine gift.

A syllogism is discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.

We think we understand a thing without qualification when we think we know the cause on account of which it is so, and that it cannot be otherwise.

Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.

An idea can be like nothing but an idea.

There was Chaos and Night and black Erebus at first, and wide Tartarus, and no earth or air or sky; and in the boundless bosom of Erebus black-winged Night brought forth a wind-egg.

What do you want to call the place? Something grand, out of the clouds, plenty of puff to it. Cloudcuckooland?

Brekekekex koax koax.

The poet should be admired for skill and for good counsel, and because we make people better in their cities.

I would rather that my lyre were out of tune and discordant, and that the chorus I led should be, and that most men should disagree with me, than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself.

Nature herself shows that it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less.

All instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs.

Whoever thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.

Nothing is created, either in the operations of art or in those of nature, and it may be laid down as a principle that in every operation there is an equal quantity of matter before and after.

We cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language which belongs to it.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

It was unearthly, and the men were. No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it, this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

I know that by nature you are not the sort to say such things or to devise mischief. But the prize of victory is sweet to win, so bring yourself to do it, and we shall be shown to be just another time.

Everything becomes disgust when a man abandons his own nature and does what does not befit him.

If you associate with me, on the very day you will go home a better man, and the same the next day, and every day you will get better and better.

Zeus, fearing that our race would be wholly destroyed, sent Hermes to bring justice and shame to men, and ordered that all should have a share, for cities cannot exist if only a few share in them as in the other arts.

If someone should demonstrate that the likes themselves come to be unlike or the unlikes like, that, I think, would be a marvel; but if he shows that things which partake of both of these have both properties, there seems to me nothing strange about that.

You are still young, Socrates, and philosophy has not yet taken hold of you as I think it will. Then you will not despise even the meanest things.

My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.

Man is the measure of all things, of the things which are that they are, and of the things which are not that they are not.

Do not suppose that I am turning into a kind of parricide. We shall have to put the statement of father Parmenides to the torture, and insist that what is not, in some respect has being, and conversely that what is, in a way is not.

When we speak of what is not, it seems we do not mean something contrary to what is, but only something different from it.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.

Speech was instituted in order that we might either teach or be reminded. What then do we do when we speak, except teach or be taught?

If I am given a sign and I do not know the thing of which it is a sign, it teaches me nothing; if I know the thing, what does the sign teach me?

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

You are very fortunate, Father, to be able to say that, for otherwise I should have thought it a great sin.

I want us to be men, and on every occasion for the bottom of our hearts to show itself in what we say.

Sometimes it is a sign of honesty to hide what one thinks. Would it be right to tell a thousand people what one feels about them?

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. Why are there beings at all instead of nothing, this is manifestly the first of all questions.

Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being.

Socrates meets Ion, a professional reciter of Homer fresh from winning a prize, and asks how he can speak so well about Homer and not about other poets, a puzzle Ion cannot answer since genuine expertise should ordinarily transfer across a subject's various instances.

Socrates suggests that rhapsode and poet alike work not by knowledge or skill but by divine possession, passed down like the pull of a magnet through a chain of iron rings, offering antiquity's most memorable model of inspiration as external force moving through passive conduits.

The True History parodies travelers' tales by taking its narrator on a journey to the moon and inside the body of a whale, announcing from the outset that everything the narrator relates is invented, a genuine novelty in ancient literature's typically more earnest claims to factual truth.

The Sale of Creeds stages an auction in which the major philosophical schools are sold off to bidders like commodities at a marketplace, turning philosophy's own claimed seriousness and dignity into comic spectacle through this deliberately undignified commercial framing.

Porphyry explains the five predicables, genus, species, difference, property and accident, and how each is defined and related to the others, giving logical students an essential and enduring vocabulary for classifying concepts with technical precision.

Porphyry raises but declines to answer whether genera and species exist in reality or only in the mind, identifying with unusual clarity the question that became the medieval problem of universals, one of Western philosophy's most persistently contested metaphysical debates.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father.

For us men and for our salvation he came down and was incarnate, was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven, and cometh to judge the living and the dead.

Maimonides reads the physical language scripture uses of God, God's hand, God's place, God's speech, as figurative rather than literal, and argues that nothing positive can actually be said of God at all, only what he is not, a negative theology refusing any positive description of divine nature.

Maimonides examines the Aristotelian proofs of God and the eternity of the world, and defends creation as philosophically possible rather than demonstrated, neither proven by reason nor disprovable by it, a genuinely honest account of where rational argument's actual limits fall on this contested question.

One person is said to teach another in that, by means of signs, he manifests to that other the process of reasoning which he himself goes through by his own natural reason.

A teacher does not cause knowledge in the learner directly, as fire causes heat, but rather stimulates and helps the learner's own reason to discover, by itself, what the teacher already knows.

As the Philosopher says in the Metaphysics, the office of the wise man is to order things. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic is to know order.

Certain knowledge, which is called science, is had when we know a thing through its cause, and know that this cause cannot be otherwise, and know that the conclusion necessarily follows from it.

It is time, sister, if you are not sleepy, to tell us one of your lovely little stories to while away the night.

Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say.

Sidney argues that poetry is the oldest of learning and the best teacher of virtue, because it joins the philosopher's precept to the historian's example in a golden world of its own making, combining abstraction's generality with narrative's concrete particularity.

Sidney answers the charges that poets lie and corrupt, treating poetry's fictional status not as a liability requiring apology but as the very source of its distinctive pedagogical power, addressing moral objections to literature with unusual philosophical seriousness.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience he is determined to prove a villain and sets out to remove everyone between himself and the throne, giving the play's central antagonist unsettling self-aware intelligence about his own moral status.

He woos Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, has his brother Clarence drowned in a wine butt, and has his young nephews murdered in the Tower after seizing the crown, escalating villainy through calculated rhetorical and physical cruelty.

Raleigh describes the capture of the Spanish governor at Trinidad and the ascent of the Orinoco river in open boats, in search of El Dorado, the golden city of Manoa, a considerable expedition undertaken specifically to restore his standing with Elizabeth I.

Raleigh describes the tribes he met and enlisted as English allies against Spain, and the wealth he was told of but never saw, combining calculated imperial diplomatic strategy with an unusually honest admission about treasure he could not actually confirm.

A Chorus asks the audience to imagine the armies the stage cannot hold, making theatrical limitation itself an explicit theme, Shakespeare drawing attention to performance's own constructed nature rather than concealing it behind conventional dramatic illusion.

Henry exposes three traitors, takes Harfleur, hangs his old companion Bardolph for looting, and walks in disguise among his soldiers the night before Agincourt, demonstrating the reformed prince's complete transformation into disciplined wartime king.

Returning from war to Messina, the young lord Claudio falls for Hero, the governor's daughter, while Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice resume a running battle of insults their friends will need only manipulate into acknowledged mutual attraction.

The prince's bastard brother Don John stages a scene that makes Claudio think Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio denounces her at the altar, staging a genuinely brutal public humiliation the play's title ironically frames as much ado about nothing.

In the seventh year of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Troilus loves Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks, and her uncle Pandarus brings them together, staging romance within a war already grinding well past its initial heroic excitement.

The next morning Cressida is traded to the Greek camp for a prisoner, and Troilus watches from hiding as she gives herself to the Greek Diomedes, staging betrayal witnessed rather than merely reported and forcing the audience to share his devastating position.

Face, Subtle and Dol Common set up their alchemical fraud in the London house of Face's master Lovewit, who has fled the plague, posing respectively as a servant, an alchemist and his assistant to a stream of gulls each promised exactly what their own particular greed most desires.

Sir Epicure Mammon arrives with a genuinely operatic fantasy of limitless alchemical gold, his greed rendered in language so extravagant that it becomes the play's most memorable single comic performance, exposing greed's capacity for self-deceiving grandiosity more fully than any other single gull.

If they be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two, thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if the other do; and though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans, and hearkens after it.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is; me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Hobbes objects that from the fact that I am a thinking thing, it does not follow that thought requires an immaterial substance distinct from body, since a material subject might just as well be what does the thinking, and Descartes's reply insists the objection has missed what the Meditations actually claims to prove at this stage.

Arnauld presses Descartes on an apparent circle, that the certainty of clear and distinct ideas seems to depend on first proving God's existence and non-deception, while the proof of God's existence itself seems to depend on trusting clear and distinct ideas already.

In a Paris salon a prude, a fop, a pedantic poet and their more sensible hosts argue about whether The School for Wives is indecent, badly built and beneath the rules of art, staging the actual critical attacks on Molière's earlier play as dramatic dialogue.

Molière's spokesmen answer that the point of comedy is to please, that the rules critics invoke are only common sense rather than fixed law, and that the ordinary audience in the pit is a better judge of a play's worth than professional critics.

Mirabell asks Millamant to submit to certain conditions before he asks her to marry him, and she answers that she will not be called names after she is married, dwindling into a wife, and that she may by degrees dwindle into a wife, but she will not begin.

Millamant demands the liberty to write and receive letters without interrogation, to come and go as she pleases, to pay and receive visits when and to whom she pleases, to have no obligation to converse with wits she does not like, and never to be called by any fond diminishing name after she is married.

The narrative allegorizes the Roman, Anglican and dissenting churches as three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack, who twist their father's will to justify altering the coats he left them.

The brothers' story is repeatedly interrupted by digressions in the voice of a modern hack writer, on critics, on madness, on digressions themselves, that parody the pedantry and self-importance of contemporary authors.

Written as a dialogue between Philalethes, who speaks for Locke's actual positions, and Theophilus, who speaks for Leibniz's own views, the book proceeds chapter by chapter through Locke's Essay, keeping each specific philosophical disagreement concrete rather than allowing it to remain abstract.

Against Locke's image of the mind as a blank slate written on entirely by experience, Leibniz argues for innate ideas and truths that experience only awakens rather than creates, comparing the mind to a block of marble already containing veins that guide how a sculptor's work can proceed.

Pope argues that good criticism follows nature and the rules the ancients drew from her, staking out a considered middle position between purely subjective taste and rigid rule-following, treating inherited critical principles as genuine discoveries about nature itself.

Part two lists the causes of bad judgement, pride, imperfect learning, love of parts rather than the whole, and fashion, diagnosing specific and recognizable critical failures with examples of sound echoing sense throughout the poem's own technical execution.

The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it, and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

What say you to this? Since, according to you, men judge of the reality of things by their senses, how can a man be mistaken in thinking the moon a plain lucid surface, about a foot in diameter, or a slave, as it appears to the naked eye?

A reasonable public-spirited projector calculates that Ireland's poverty could be relieved if the children of the poor were fattened and sold at one year old as food for the rich, working through the economics with genuine apparent care.

The projector recommends recipes and lists the advantages to landlords, parents and the nation, dismissing gentler remedies as impractical beside his own carefully reasoned solution.

Johnson's Preface describes the considerable labor of compiling the Dictionary almost single-handedly across nine years, and reflects with genuine honesty on lexicography's actual limits, concluding that no dictionary can permanently fix a living language against its own continued drift and change.

Johnson defines lexicographer as a harmless drudge, one of many entries where his own opinionated wit and personality enter directly into what might otherwise remain dry reference material, a quality that has made individual Dictionary entries quoted long after their original lexicographical purpose.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

Beauty is a social quality, for where women and men, and not only they but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, and make us count nothing in the estimation of ourselves which do not command such regard, they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection.

Hume states his central problem directly: beauty is no quality in things themselves but a sentiment in the mind, which seems to make all tastes equally valid, and yet no reasonable person actually believes the poet Ogilby wrote as well as Milton, creating a genuine tension his essay sets out to resolve.

Hume argues that although sentiment cannot be argued with directly, since it expresses the mind's own response rather than a claim about external fact, some sentiments are nonetheless produced by better instruments than others, relocating the actual standard for judgment onto the quality of the judging mind itself.

Tristram sets out to tell his life and opinions but cannot get himself born until volume three, since every fact requires a digression, making narrative delay itself the novel's genuine formal subject rather than merely an obstacle to proper storytelling.

The book is really about his father Walter, a theorist of names and noses, his gentle Uncle Toby, who refights the siege of Namur in the garden, and the Widow Wadman's campaign for Toby, populating the novel with figures more vivid than Tristram himself.

Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever and rage to anger, and the man who has ecstasies and visions and takes his dreams for realities is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly, that is the first law of nature.

Johnson argues that Shakespeare has stood the test of time because he is the poet of general nature, his characters not individuals defined by narrow, topical particularity but genuine species, recognizable human types whose truth to human nature generally explains his continued, undiminished appeal across changing periods and audiences.

Johnson lists Shakespeare's faults with genuine bluntness, his carelessness with plot construction, his frequent indulgence in punning wordplay Johnson considers a persistent weakness, and his failure to teach clear moral lessons through his dramatic plots, criticisms offered directly rather than glossed over in service of uncomplicated reverence.

Lady Sneerwell's circle manufactures scandal for sport, and the brothers Surface are its subjects: Joseph, a hypocrite of fine sentiments, and Charles, an open-handed spendthrift who is the better man, staging gossip as genuine social institution.

Their rich uncle Sir Oliver returns from India in disguise to test them, staging character assessment through deliberate deception, the brothers revealing their genuine natures without knowing they are actually being evaluated for the inheritance at stake.

Johnson states his critical opinions on figures like Milton and Gray without hedging, judging Milton's republican politics harshly even while praising Paradise Lost's genuine poetic achievement, and offering pointed criticism of Gray's odes that many contemporary readers found considerably less generous than expected.

The life of Cowley opens with Johnson's extended account of the metaphysical poets, a group he defines and critically evaluates as a distinct category, an influential piece of literary criticism that shaped how English poetry from this period would subsequently be classified and discussed.

The volume opens with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which a sailor shoots an albatross, watches his shipmates die, and is redeemed when he blesses the water-snakes unaware, and must tell his tale forever.

Between are ballads of the rural poor, a girl who insists that her dead brother and sister still make seven, a mad mother, an idiot boy sent for the doctor, and an old huntsman whose neighbours will not let him gather wood.

Lamb argues that acting reduces Hamlet's inward, constantly qualifying thought to definite physical gesture and vocal delivery, foreclosing the interpretive openness a reader's own imagination can sustain indefinitely when encountering the same language on the page rather than embodied by a specific actor.

Lamb contends that Lear's storm and his descent into madness cannot be adequately represented onstage without becoming either painful to watch or genuinely absurd, since the physical spectacle of staged madness risks undermining the sublime terror the same material achieves when read privately in the mind.

Coleridge defines the primary imagination as the living power and prime agent of all human perception, a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite mind.

Fancy, by contrast, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites, and must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association, unable, unlike the imagination, to dissolve, diffuse and recreate its materials into something genuinely new.

Shelley argues that poetry in the broad sense, the imaginative making of order, underlies language, law, religion and science, and that poets have been the founders of civil society, considerably expanding poetry's claimed scope beyond verse alone.

Poetry enlarges the sympathetic imagination, which is the instrument of moral good, giving aesthetic experience direct ethical consequence and connecting imaginative literature's pleasures to genuine moral development rather than treating them as merely decorative.

The company at Charles Lamb's plays a game of naming which dead persons they would most wish to have met, and Lamb, rejecting the more obvious and fashionable choices other guests propose, argues instead for the considerably less expected Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville.

The conversation ranges widely across Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Pope, Dr Johnson and Rousseau, weighing for each the specific pleasure or risk of actual acquaintance against the more distant pleasure of admiring their work from a comfortable historical remove.

Hugo divides human history into three successive ages, primitive, ancient and modern, arguing that each age naturally produces its own characteristic literary form, lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama respectively, treating literary form itself as developing alongside broader historical change.

He argues that modern art must mix the sublime and the grotesque within a single work, as Shakespeare did, rejecting the classical separation of tragedy and comedy into distinct, formally pure genres in favor of a considerably more mixed and historically accurate representation of human experience.

Mill argues that all real inference is from particulars to particulars, and that the syllogism, rather than producing new knowledge through deduction, merely registers an inference already made, relocating genuine logical work away from formal deductive reasoning.

Mill grounds all inductive inference in the uniformity of nature, the assumption that what has been observed to hold in examined cases will hold in unexamined cases as well, giving induction itself a foundation earlier writers on method had largely left assumed rather than argued.

Poe argues that a long poem is a contradiction in terms, since poetic excitement cannot be sustained, challenging the entire epic tradition and staking out an unusually radical position about the proper scale and duration of genuine poetic experience.

Poe denounces the heresy of the didactic, the belief that poetry should teach a moral, insisting instead that poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty and that its province is taste, between the pure intellect and the moral sense.

Sainte-Beuve asks what makes a writer a classic and answers that it is not conformity to ancient rules but the enrichment of the human mind in a form that is at once new and old, large and fine, easily contemporary with every age.

Sainte-Beuve surveys Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and the French seventeenth century, demonstrating his criterion's genuine cross-cultural applicability rather than remaining merely a parochial defense of any single national or period-specific literary tradition.

Douglass tells his audience that the Fourth of July is theirs, not his, and asks what, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July, answering that it is a day that reveals to him, more than any other day of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

He states plainly that he will not argue that slavery is wrong, since the point needs no argument, and that to do so would be to make himself ridiculous and to insult his audience's understanding by proving what nobody with genuine moral sense actually doubts.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

What you have got to do is to be securing yourselves in habits of industry, and, I may say, of silence, and of discretion.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time, our self which endures.

To think intuitively is to think in duration. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition.

Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, bets Colonel Pickering that in six months he can pass off Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower girl, as a duchess by teaching her to speak, staging class as fundamentally performable through learned speech.

Higgins succeeds at an ambassador's party, then treats the triumph as his own and Eliza as a finished experiment, exposing how thoroughly intellectual accomplishment can blind its own author to the actual person that accomplishment was performed upon.

Russell tries to build an account of mind out of the same neutral stuff as matter, drawing on American behaviourism and William James, treating instinct, habit, desire, memory, images, belief and consciousness one by one across fifteen lectures.

Russell argues that none of instinct, habit, desire, memory, images, belief or consciousness requires a mental substance distinct from the world of physics, mind and matter instead being two ways of grouping the same underlying events, a view he calls neutral monism.

Stephen Dedalus, recently returned from Paris and mourning his mother's death, leaves the Martello tower where he has been staying and proceeds to teach a history class, carrying his grief and his strained relationship with his own living father throughout the day's subsequent events.

Leopold Bloom moves through an ordinary day's activities, cooking breakfast, attending a funeral, visiting a newspaper office, eating lunch, and wandering Dublin's streets, while his wife Molly waits at home for a scheduled visit from her lover, a domestic situation Bloom is aware of but does not directly confront.

As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.

There is a strange new world within the Bible, the world of God, and it is not our task to explain this strange world, to fit it into our own, but to enter it and let it question us.

What is the meaning of a word? Wittgenstein refuses to answer by pointing to a mental object, and proposes instead that we look at how a word is used, in simple language games that show the use whole.

The craving for generality, the tendency to look for something in common to all the things we call by one name, is the real source of metaphysics, and it comes from our preoccupation with the method of science; the things called games have no common essence but a family resemblance.