Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
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If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
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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.
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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.
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You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.
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So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
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253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.
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The way you use the word 'God' does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.
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467. 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.'
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Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: 'Let’s have done with it now,' and it’s having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.
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Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
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In Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht.
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Ambition is the death of thought.
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What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
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The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
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If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.
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Don’t say: 'They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’' but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!
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If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
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You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
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Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
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A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.