Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am my world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.6.4311Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language disguises thought.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’—in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein