Top 100 Quotes About Wittgenstein
#1. Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.
George Pattison
#2. The meaning of the world, said Wittgenstein, is outside the world. Events and values are distinguishable only in relation to others. A totality of events and values, the world itself, requires another.
Guy Davenport
#3. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), went so far as to say that the limits of our language were, indeed, the limits of our world.
Anonymous
#4. Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
#5. What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation
Terry Eagleton
#6. When Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: 'All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning!
Apostolos Doxiadis
#7. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
#8. It is difficult to deviate from an old line of thought 'just a little'. The radical departure is easier than the subtle deviation." Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Paul Byall
#9. Well, what does "good" mean anyway ... ? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation.
John Searle
#10. It is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities" -- Pretty Wittgenstein like.
Milan Kundera
#11. What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.' (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.
William Barrett
#12. Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.
Guy Davenport
#13. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.
Victor Pelevin
#14. Said in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#15. Although Wittgenstein did say, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Louisa Hall
#16. We are led into philosophical confusion, thought Wittgenstein, by seeking explanations at times when we should instead simply stop and say, "This is how things are.
Carl Elliott
#17. The danger of academic life, thought Wittgenstein, is that we are encouraged to go on talking even when we know in our hearts that we have nothing valuable to say.
Carl Elliott
#18. Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.
Simon Blackburn
#19. Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all?
Tony Hendra
#20. Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.
Clifford Geertz
#21. It is why God created matter, most of all the human body, which has the greatest power to make spirit visible. (Thus the philosopher Wittgenstein, asked what a human soul could possibly look like, answered, "Like a human body.")
Peter Kreeft
#22. Wittgenstein had helped fake the moon landings.
Mark Adams
#23. The body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.
Oliver Sacks
#24. Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
#25. Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#26. I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#29. 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
#30. When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything ... And all rites are of this kind.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#31. The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#32. Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#33. 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
#34. The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#35. A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#36. What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#37. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#38. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#40. For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#41. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#43. The 2 timeless drivers that underpin the behavior of every generation: the need to belong and the need to be significant. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#44. A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#46. Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#47. 2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. 2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. 2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#49. Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
Haruki Murakami
#51. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#54. This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#55. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#56. 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
#57. Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless ... (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#58. A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#60. A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#61. 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
#62. The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#63. For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#64. Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#65. ...the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#66. A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in ...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#68. Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#69. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#70. People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#72. 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
#73. A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#74. 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
#75. If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#76. 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
#77. The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#78. What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#79. The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#80. The "experience" which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience. Logic precedes every experience - that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#81. Death is not an experience in life; we do not live to experience death.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#82. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#83. 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
#84. Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#85. 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
#86. No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#87. The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#89. 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
#91. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#92. It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#93. What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#94. 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
#95. Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#96. The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#98. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#99. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#100. It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how music should be played.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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