Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

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

Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an "illogical" world would look like.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There can never be surprises in logic.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite?For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.)Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Music conveys to us itself!

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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