Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

The face is the soul of the body.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

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.

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.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

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

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.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

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

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

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

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

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.

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

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

Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

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

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

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.

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.

I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

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?

Black seems to make a colour cloudy, but darkness doesn't. A ruby could thus keep getting darker without ever becoming cloudy; but if it became blackish red, it would become cloudy.

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

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

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

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.

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

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

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

All mathematics is tautology.

The world is independent of my will.

To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning.

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.

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

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.

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.

Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.

We learn by rearranging what we know.

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.