Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.

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

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

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

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

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

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

Language disguises thought.

Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway?

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.

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.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . .

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

People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.

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

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.

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

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

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.--Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.

I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

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

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

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

Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.

It is love that believes the resurrection.

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

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.

It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

That the world is, is the mystical.

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.

I am my world.

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.

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).

The truth of the thoughts that are here set forth seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.

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

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

Elementary propositions consist of names.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.