Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes
Austrian-born philosopher who twice changed the course of analytic philosophy — first with the Tractatus, then with the Philosophical Investigations.
52 passages across 11 themes. More on Ludwig Wittgenstein.
On action
“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”
“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.”
“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”
“The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)”
“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)”
“If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)”
“The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)”
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)”
“For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.”
“I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.”
“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”
“A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.”
“The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.”
“The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.”
“Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”
“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?”
“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word white?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”
On mind
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
“I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.”
“My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.”
“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
“What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.”
“It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.”
“The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)”
“The thought is the significant proposition. (4)”
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)”
“What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?”
“Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”
“An entire mythology is stored within our language.”
“People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.”
“This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.”
On truth
“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”
“It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.”
“It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)”
“A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)”
“Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)”
“To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”
“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
On presence
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
“One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.”
“Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot. (3.0321)”
“The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”
“The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.”
On faith
“Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”
“Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”
“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”
On silence
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
On solitude
“The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”
On joy
“The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy. (6.43)”
On love
“Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”
On wholeness
“We must plow through the whole of language.”
On time
“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”