Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

202. “Only let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

203. “One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I.’”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

204. “An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

205. “Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

206. “We learn by rearranging what we know.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

207. “The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

208. “471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

209. “I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

210. “The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

211. “Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

214. “For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

215. “With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

216. “If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

217. “A man’s thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

218. “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

219. “I Once wrote: “In mathematics process and result are equivalent.””

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

220. “The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

221. “A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

222. “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

223. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

224. “A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

227. “What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

228. “Es ist offenbar, dass auch eine von der wirklichen noch so verschieden gedachte Welt Etwas – eine Form – mit der wirklichen gemein haben muss.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

229. “The world is made up of facts, not things.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

230. “Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

231. “It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

232. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

234. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

235. “A color which would be ‘dirty’ if it were the color of a wall, needn’t be so in a painting.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

236. “There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

237. “It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

238. “If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

239. “The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

240. “The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

241. “Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

242. “There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

243. “Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

244. “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life .”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

245. “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

246. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

247. “Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

248. “In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

249. “All mathematics is tautology.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

250. “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein