Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.

I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."

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

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

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.

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

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.

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

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

The World and Life are one.

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.

White must be the lightest color in a picture.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Indeed how might it be if things revealed their colors only when (in our terms) no light fell on them - if, for example, the sky were black? Could we not then say, only by black light do they appear to us in their full colors?

The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

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

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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

There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.

Death is not an experience in life; we do not live to experience death.

It is love that believes the resurrection.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.

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

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

Don't look for the meanings; look for the use.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world ... What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about ... What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described.

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

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

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.

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.

What a curious attitude scientists have: "We still don't know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!"' As if that went without saying.

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

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.

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

One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.
You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well.
I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.)
Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count.

It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given. This is not necessary because it is even impossible . There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

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

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

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.

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

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?

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.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

About what one can not speak, one must remain silent.

Suppose we think while we talk or write
I mean, as we normally do
we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

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

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.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

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?

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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.

Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world - I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.

The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

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

Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.

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.

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

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.

It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now sixty two years old, yet just one moment ago I realised that I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

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.

There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.

Golden is a surface colour.

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul ...

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

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

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.

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.

We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.

Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.

The face is the soul of the body.

The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression.

How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.

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

Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

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!

All propositions are of equal value.

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

What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.

An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

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.

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.