Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One observes in order to see what one would not see if one did not observe.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world is the totality of facts, not things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The less somebody knows and understand himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

Ludwig Wittgenstein