Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

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

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Language disguises thought.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

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

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

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

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

The face is the soul of the body.

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

A confession has to be part of your new life.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor 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.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

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.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time

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.