Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

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

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

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

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

I am my world.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Only describe, don't explain.

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

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

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.

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

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

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.

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

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

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

Life can be a misunderstanding, if we are ignorant of the right language or don’t try to learn it. « If lions could speak, we would not understand them. » says Ludwig Wittgenstein. If we make an effort, however, we could manage to understand. ( “ Life was a misunderstanding » )

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

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.

Language disguises thought.

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.

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

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

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.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

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

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

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

Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.

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

This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.

If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?

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

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.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

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.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

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.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

The face is the soul of the body.

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.

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.

لا شيء أصعب من تجنب خداع المرء لنفسه.

Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?

The world is everything that is the case.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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.

We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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 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

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

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

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

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

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

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.

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.

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?

The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

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.

You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.

That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.

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. [Es ist die große Täuschung der Moderne, dass die Naturgesetze uns die Welt erklären. Die Naturgesetze beschreiben die Welt, sie beschreiben die Gesetzmäßigkeiten. Aber sie erklären uns nichts.]

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

6.4311 Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist. 6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.

Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken. Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit. Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen. Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen. Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen. 4.112 The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions", but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.