Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by Ludwig Wittgenstein - Page 3

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

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).

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.

The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.

The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world.

The world divides into facts.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.

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

A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.

What makes a subject difficult to understand ? if it is significant, important ? is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Elementary propositions consist of names.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

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.

I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."

Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs

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.

Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.

I am my world.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

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.

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.

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.

The world is everything that is the case.

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

All mathematics is tautology.

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

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.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

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.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.

The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.