First, wet tea leaves are spread on the floor in the sparsely furnished room.
They are left for a little while so that the dust is absorbed.
Then the floor is swept clean.
weil wittgenstein dialogue
We are a part that is supposed to imitate the whole.
It’s good that I don’t let myself be influenced!
I can sully the whole universe with my suffering and not feel this misery, or I can completely sum up this misery in myself.
The physicist James Jeans has written a book, The Mysterious Universe. I detest it and call it misleading. I would call the title alone misleading…I could say the title “The Mysterious Universe” implies a kind of idolatry, and the idol is the scientist and science.
Looking and waiting is the behaviour appropriate to the beautiful. As long as one can still imagine, want, desire, the beautiful does not appear. That is why all beauty contains irrevocable contradiction, bitterness and absence.
The inexpressible (that which seems mysterious to me and which I am unable to express) provides the background on which what I have been able to express takes on meaning.
As soon as one has a point of eternity in the soul, one has nothing more to do than to preserve it, for it grows from itself like a seed. One must be constantly on guard around it, in full armour and motionless, and nourish its vigilance in the contemplation of numbers, of fixed and strict relations.
One nourishes the unchanging in the soul by contemplating the unchanging in the physical world.
On mathematics: “You have a wrong concept. – But the matter cannot be cleared up by me railing against your words; but only by trying to draw your attention away from certain expressions, illustrations, ideas, and towards the use of the words”.
“The deception concerning things in the world does not concern their existence, but their value. The parable of the cave refers to value. We possess only shadows of replicas of the good. And it is precisely in relation to the good that we are prisoners and in bondage (imprisonment). We accept the false values that appear to us, and when we think we are acting, we are in fact immobile, because we remain within the same value system.
The family tree of psychological phenomena: I am not aiming for exactness, but for clarity.
Agony is the last night, which even perfection needs for complete purity, and therefore it is better that it be bitter.
I had just taken apples out of a paper bag where they had lain for a long time; I had to cut half of many away and throw them away. Then, when I copied out a sentence of mine, the last half of which was bad, I saw it immediately half rotten apple.
Power (and money as the passe-partout of power) is the pure means. That is why it is the highest goal of those who have not understood.
As mathematics or physics, something looks irrefutable, and that gives it an even greater appeal. If we explain the environment of the expression, we see that the thing could have been expressed quite differently. I can express it in a way in which it will lose its appeal for many people and certainly for me.
Misfortune: time leads the thinking being towards what it cannot bear and what will nevertheless come to pass. “May this cup pass me by!” Every second that passes, a being in this world travels away to something impossible with it.
The question is, what should the logician say here?
The low and the superficial are of equal rank. One can say: his love is fierce but low; but it is impossible to say: his love is deep but low.
I am reassured that it is so.
weil wittgenstein wedding
Two waves [W + W] pass through each other without influencing each other
