Ludwig Wittgenstein > Quotes

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I am my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
― 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

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Only describe, don't explain.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“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. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

“What can be shown, cannot be said.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Don't think, but look! (PI 66)”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951

“If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The face is the soul of the body.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“The world is everything that is the case.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is. ”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks

“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, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

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

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus