Wittgenstein Quotes

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

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein could not avoid recognizing that "an experience is such that when I prove it to myself I marvel at the existence of the world. And here I am inclined to use phrases such as 'how extraordinary it is that something exists' or 'how extraordinary it is that the world exists.'" This wonder at existence is the condition for an authentic encounter with things and opens up the possibility of knowledge. ~ Marco Bersanelli

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

It is love that believes the resurrection. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Aim at being loved without being admired. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

To believe in God is to see that life has meaning ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

An even more important philosophical contact was with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began as my pupil and ended as my supplanter at both Oxford and Cambridge. He had intended to become an engineer and had gone to Manchester for that purpose. The training for an engineer required mathematics, and he was thus led to interest in the foundations of mathematics. He inquired at Manchester whether there was such a subject and whether anybody worked at it. They told him about me, and so he came to Cambridge. He was queer, and his notions seemed to me odd, so that for a whole term I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric. At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?" I replied, "My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?" He said, "Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher." I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him: "No, you must not become an aeronaut." And he didn't.
The collected papers of Bertrand Russell: Last Philosophical Testament ~ Bertrand Russell

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? ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The sense of a truth-function of p is a function of the sense of p. Denial, logical addition, logical multiplication, etc. etc., are operations. (Denial reverses the sense of a proposition.) ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man is the microcosm: I am my world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode. ~ Jonathan Sacks

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

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

We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Although Wittgenstein did say, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." >>> ~ Louisa Hall

For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70) ~ Jerry A. Fodor

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered; it is a question of what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge.
[Moritz Schlick interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's position] ~ Moritz Schlick

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), went so far as to say that the limits of our language were, indeed, the limits of our world. ~ Anonymous

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

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

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The truth of the thoughts that are here set forth seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

One must always be prepared to learn something totally new. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent ... ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Golden is a surface colour. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

White must be the lightest color in a picture. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time - but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself! ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D. Barrow

I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.) ~ Joyce Carol Oates

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need? ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Wittgenstein came to believe that a great many philosophical puzzles arise out of people misusing language in this way. Take, for example, the statement 'I have a pain', which is grammatically akin to 'I have a hat'. This similarity might mislead us into thinking that pains, or 'experiences' in general, are things we have in the same way that we have hats. But it would be strange to say 'Here, take my pain'. And though it would make sense to say 'Is this your hat or mine?', it would sound odd to ask 'Is this your pain or mine?' Perhaps there are several people in a room and a pain floating around in it; and as each person in turn doubles up in agony, we exclaim: 'Ah, now he's having it!'

This sounds merely silly; but in fact it has some fairly momentous implications. Wittgenstein is able to disentangle the grammar of 'I have a hat' from 'I have a pain' not only in a way that throws light on the use of personal pronouns like 'I' and 'he', but in ways which undermine the long-standing assumption that my experiences are a kind of private property. In fact, they seem even more like private property than my hat, since I can give away my hat, but not my pain. Wittgenstein shows us how grammar deceives us into thinking this way, and his case has radical, even politically radical, consequences.

The task of the philosopher, Wittgenstein thought, was not so much to resolve these inquiries as to dissolve them – to show that they spring from confusing one kind of 'l ~ Terry Eagleton

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.) ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

Don't look for the meanings; look for the use. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

This is all that "ordinary" in the phrase "ordinary language philosophy" means, or ought to mean. It does not refer to particular words of wide use, nor to particular sorts of men. It reminds us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) means, and that sometimes men, do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot, mean anything, and they are struck dumb. ~ Stanley Cavell

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

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

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

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

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

That the world is, is the mystical. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

How small a thought it takes to fill a life. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein's life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly. ~ Olivia Laing

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! ~ Stephen Hawking