Top 100 Wittgenstein's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#6. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#8. 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
#10. The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#11. No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#12. 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
#13. 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
#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. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#16. Death is not an experience in life; we do not live to experience death.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#23. 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
#24. A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#25. 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
#27. Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#29. Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#30. Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved ... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#31. It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#32. Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#33. Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#34. It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#35. 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
#36. Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#37. 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
#38. Deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
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
#43. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#44. 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
#45. One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)
Jerry A. Fodor
#46. 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
#47. Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#48. I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#49. 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
#50. Freud 's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#61. 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
#62. What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#63. A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#64. The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), went so far as to say that the limits of our language were, indeed, the limits of our world.
Anonymous
#68. Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#69. 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
#70. The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#76. I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. ...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
#82. 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
#83. For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#88. A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#89. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#90. 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
#91. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#92. This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#95. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#97. Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
Haruki Murakami
#99. 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
#100. 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
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