Ludwig Wittgenstein - Say Quotes

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

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
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
What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work.

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
Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

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
Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?

Ludwig Wittgenstein
'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.
You say : The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Ludwig Wittgenstein