Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

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

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

All I know is what I have words for.

If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

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

This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one.

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 him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

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

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

Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

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

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.

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

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.

The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

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

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.

[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

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

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

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

All propositions are of equal value.

Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.

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

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

The world is the totality of facts, not of things

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

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

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.