Ludwig Wittgenstein - Language Quotes

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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
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
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
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
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

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
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
For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for 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).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein