Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (70 Quotes)




    Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

    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.



    If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

    The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

    It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

    For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus the meaning of a word is its use in the language.


    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.

    A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

    It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

    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.

    Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.


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




    Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

    The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.


    Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

    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).


    What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.



    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.

    Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

    Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

    A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.



    When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

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

    Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

    Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

    Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.


    If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.



    Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.


    Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

    One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'




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