Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

52. “That which cannot be said must not be said. That which cannot be said, one must be silent thereof.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

55. “I’m doing philosophy like an old woman, first I’m looking for my pencil, then I’m looking for my glasses, then I’m looking for my pencil again.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

56. “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

57. “I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

59. “Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

60. “It is love that believes the resurrection.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

61. “I am my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

62. “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

64. “One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

65. “It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

66. “Man is the microcosm: I am my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

67. “The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

68. “The depressed man lives in a depressed world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

69. “Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

70. “You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

72. “Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

73. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

74. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

75. “There can never be surprises in logic.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

77. “The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

78. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

79. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

80. “If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don’t have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

81. “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

82. “If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

83. “The face is the soul of the body.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

84. “That the world is, is the mystical.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

85. “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

88. “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

89. “You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

90. “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly .”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

91. “A tautology’s truth is certain, a proposition’s possible, a contradiction’s impossible.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

93. “Could one imagine a stone’s having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

94. “What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

96. “An entire mythology is stored within our language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

97. “Don’t look for the meanings; look for the use.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein