Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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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. “One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

205. “If you already have a person’s love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

207. “No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

212. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

222. “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

223. “A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— 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. “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

228. “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

229. “All mathematics is tautology.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

230. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

232. “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

233. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

236. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

239. “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

240. “Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant – so that he constantly called different things by that name – but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’ – in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

242. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

244. “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

245. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

246. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

248. “The war saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

249. “Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up “What’s that?” – It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: this is a man, this is a house, etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what’s this then?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

250. “We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein