You caught my attention with that one: it sounded like a cuckoo quote. I don't think of Wittgenstein and silliness as exactly hanging out together. However, it turns out to be genuine and there's a related one to boot:
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
>If you are wise, however, this is precisely what you will avoid doing because the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born—or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born.
“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
Always found that quote interesting as is not really correct. Everyone is a percentage of those traits. No one is universally clever and never does anything stupid for example.
It's putting people in a box which people love to do.
“Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence. Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none. To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.” Claude Chabrol
> to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it.
Reminds me of this quote: "Do not be ashamed to speak nonsense! You only have to be attentive to your own nonsense." (Wittgenstein, Miscellaneous Remarks (Vermischte Bemerkungen))
“What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off.” — James Joyce
“The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognizing a truth which has already been recognized by others.” — Goethe
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“ — George Santayana
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