Top 100 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
#2. 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
#3. The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#4. A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#5. What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#6. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#8. The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#10. For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#11. Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#12. If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#13. Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#14. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#15. No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#16. I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#17. It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#18. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#19. One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#20. This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#21. 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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#22. Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?
In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?
Or is the use its life?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#23. There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man
but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#24. If a blind man were to ask me "Have you got two hands?" I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don't know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn't I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#25. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#30. My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#31. What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#33. In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#34. It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all ...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#35. If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#37. 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
#38. When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line and that its direction changes constantly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#39. When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#40. IfI wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was this punch that I originally wanted
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#41. Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#42. It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#44. I am now in another hole, though I have to say, it is no better than the old one. Living with human beings is hard!
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#45. A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#47. If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#50. This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it-or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#51. There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a "proposition" is a position in the game of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#52. People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#54. When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#55. A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#56. We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#58. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#59. 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
#60. All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#61. As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical
impossibility.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#62. One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense ...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#63. Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#65. Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#68. [Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#69. When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#71. Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#74. Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#75. Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#79. Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#80. Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#81. I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#82. 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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#83. Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#85. You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#87. Commenting on his "Tractatus"...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#88. 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
#89. So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#90. The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#91. For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#92. 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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#93. Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#96. Black seems to make a colour cloudy, but darkness doesn't. A ruby could thus keep getting darker without ever becoming cloudy; but if it became blackish red, it would become cloudy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#97. Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#98. 11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.
What does that mean?
What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#99. Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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