Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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.

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

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

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

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.

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

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

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.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

I am my world.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

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.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

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

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.

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.

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

Language disguises thought.

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.

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

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

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.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

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

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

So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

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

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.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....

Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.

A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

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.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Music conveys to us itself!

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

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