Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (70 Quotes)

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

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.

The world is independent of my will.

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.

If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

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

A confession has to be part of your new life.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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).

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

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

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

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.