Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophy Quotes

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In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last.

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
The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

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
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
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
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

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
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect.
On designing his sister's house

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

Ludwig Wittgenstein