Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.

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.

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

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

The depressed man lives in a depressed world.

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.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

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

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

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.

A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

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

One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.

Only describe, don't explain.

Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.

No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently - and tolerantly - to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

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

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

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

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.

The world is everything that is the case.

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

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.'

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.

One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

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

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.

It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.

No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.

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 aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.