Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. And no more is every building designed for a purpose architecture.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Mathematics is a MOTLEY of techniques and proofs.

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

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

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
A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
There should be no need to emphasize, in this century of radio sets and electronic devices, that many dreams may be assemblages of thought-elements that convey no information whatsoever: that they may be just noise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The sense of the world must lie outside the world... What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about... What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The process of calculating brings about just this intuition. Calculation is not an experiment.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.

Ludwig Wittgenstein