Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.

Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

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.

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

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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.

Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.

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

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

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.

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

That which cannot be said must not be said. That which cannot be said, one must be silent thereof.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Always get rid of theory private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you.

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.

When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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

The 2 timeless drivers that underpin the behavior of every generation: the need to belong and the need to be significant. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

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

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

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.

Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?

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

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.