Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays?
Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

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
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
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
Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments.

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
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought. It makes one want to respond with a gesture.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A curious analogy could be based on the fact that even the hugest telescope has to have an eye-piece no larger than the human eye.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ought the word "infinite" to be avoided in mathematics?" Yes; where it appears to confer a meaning upon the calculus; instead of getting one from it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mathematics is a MOTLEY of techniques and proofs.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Step by step we cross great eras in the development of thought; there is no sudden gigantic stride; a theory proceeds by slow evolution until it dominates or is destroyed.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What Eddington says about "the direction of time" and the law of entropy comes to this: time would change its direction if men should start walking backwards one day. Of course you can call it that if you like; but then you should be clear in your mind that you have said no more than that people have changed the direction they walk in.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is obvious that an imagined # world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein