Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about, you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

One age misunderstands another, and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it, but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

There can never be surprises in logic.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an illogical world would look like.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: I wish you luck. I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein