Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ambition is the death of thought.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

— 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

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

— 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

That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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 world is independent of my will.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What can be shown, cannot be said.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— 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

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts. ——

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

— 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

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is all that is the case. (1)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot. (3.0321)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The thought is the significant proposition. (4)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The face is the soul of the body.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture is a fact.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world and life are one. (5.621)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy. (6.43)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 just the way in which our visual field has no limits. (6.4311)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (6.51)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.'

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

But ordinary language is all right.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

— 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

The world is independent of my will.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

We must plow through the whole of language.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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?"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. 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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

— 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

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.

— 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

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

387. [I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

467. 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 them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

— 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

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? — Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is independent of my will.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Aim at being loved without being admired.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The less somebody knows and understand himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein