Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

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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 can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true.

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
The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world is the totality of facts, not things.

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.)

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nothing, in logic, is accidental.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

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
What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.

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
The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

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
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

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