Ludwig wittgenstein quotes

To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning.

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

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

To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.

One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Only describe, don't explain.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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.

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

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it - is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

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.

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

Since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent.

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

We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.

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 him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

Don't look for the meanings; look for the use.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

The world is independent of my will.

The world is everything that is the case.

An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

All mathematics is tautology.

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

It is love that believes the resurrection.

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.'

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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).

We learn by rearranging what we know.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

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.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

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

When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line and that its direction changes constantly.

What is thinkable is also possible.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

Ambition is the death of thought.

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.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

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

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

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

Wishing is not acting. But willing is acting.

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

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.

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.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now sixty two years old, yet just one moment ago I realised that I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread.

The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

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

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.

The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.

Language disguises thought.

One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.

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

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

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.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

All I know is what I have words for.

I am my world.

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

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

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

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.