Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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 it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: Let's have done with it now, and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy hasn't made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein