Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

“One anecdote should be recorded. I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a 'simple object'. His reply was that at that time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd.”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

“Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' (§ 6.44). 1 believe that a certain feeling of
amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew him.4 Whether this feeling has anything to do with”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

“One has to do with the origination of the central idea of the Tractatus-that a proposition is a picture. This idea came to Wittgenstein when he was serving in the Austrian army in the First War. He saw a newspaper that described the occurrence and location of an automobile accident by means of a diagram or map. It occurred to Wittgenstein that this map was a proposition and that therein was revealed the essential nature of propositions-namely, to picture”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

“The application of the parable is, I think, that if you do not understand a statement, then to discover that it has no verification is an important piece of information about it and makes you understand it better. That is to say, you understand it better; you do not find out that there”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

“One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

“Once in Cambridge I heard one undergraduate in earnestness inform another that Wittgenstein delivered his lectures while lying on the floor and gazing”
― Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir