Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

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

The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

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

All I know is what I have words for.

The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

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

There can never be surprises in logic.

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.

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

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

The depressed man lives in a depressed world.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world.

All mathematics is tautology.

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.

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.

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?

Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.

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.

Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

It is obvious that an imagined #‎ world , however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

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

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

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

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

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

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

The world is independent of my will.

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

Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

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

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

You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.

In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

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