Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 2

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

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

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

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'.

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

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

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.

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.

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

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

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

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.

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

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.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

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

There can never be surprises in logic.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

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.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions", but to make propositions clear.Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

I am my world.

That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence

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.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

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

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

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.

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

Music conveys to us itself!

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.