Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein -
Culture and Value
80 Sourced Quotes
View all Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
As long as I continue to come across questions in more remote regions which I can't answer, it is understandable that I should still not be able to find my way around regions that are less remote. For how do I know that what stands in the way of an answer here is not precisely what is preventing me from clearing away the fog over there?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Sometimes you see the idea in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
"Fare well!"
"A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye.
For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Source
Report...
Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1
2
3
Quote of the day
In England, the profession of the law is that which seems to hold out the strongest attraction to talent, from the circumstance, that in it ability, coupled with exertion, even though unaided by patronage, cannot fail of obtaining reward.
Charles Babbage
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Creative Commons
Born:
April 26, 1889
Died:
April 29, 1951
(aged 62)
More about Ludwig Wittgenstein...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes