Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

252. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

254. “Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

255. “Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

256. “The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense. – Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

257. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

259. “A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

260. “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it-or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

261. “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

262. “If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’; he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

263. “Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

264. “This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

265. “Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

266. “Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

267. “So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

268. “The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

269. “Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

270. “There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

271. “A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

272. “Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

273. “How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

274. “We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

275. “Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

276. “Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

277. “Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

278. “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

279. “What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

280. “The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

281. “It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

282. “In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

283. “White must be the lightest color in a picture.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

284. “Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn’t rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

285. “Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

286. “The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

287. “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.’”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

288. “I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

289. “Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

290. “The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

291. “It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something – a form – in common with it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

292. “It’s only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

293. “A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

294. “We must plow through the whole of language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

295. “Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

296. “We just do not see how very specialized the use of “I know” is.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

297. “There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

298. “Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don’t have to fear for what’s in it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

299. “One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

300. “The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein