Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

302. “Some people’s taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

303. “Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

304. “The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

305. “A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

306. “There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a “proposition” is a position in the game of language.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

307. “To pray is to think about the meaning of life.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

308. “So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

309. “What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

310. “If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

311. “Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

312. “You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

313. “I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

314. “But doesn’t it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

315. “It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

316. “Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

317. “It’s not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

318. “A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

319. “A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

320. “Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

321. “It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

322. “The World and Life are one.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

323. “Suppose we think while we talk or write – I mean, as we normally do – we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

324. “But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

325. “The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

326. “I want to say: We use judgements as principlesof judegement.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

327. “What a curious attitude scientists have: “We still don’t know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!”’ As if that went without saying.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

328. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

329. “Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

330. “Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

331. “Our motto might be: “Let us not be bewitched”.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

332. “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

333. “Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world – I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

334. “I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. 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

335. “Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

336. “Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be on of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

337. “Elementary propositions consist of names.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

338. “2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. 2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. 2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

339. “The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

340. “Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. It is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, but that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

341. “I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

342. “The same operation which makes “q” from “p”, makes “r” from “q”, and so on. This can only be expressed by the fact that “p”, “q”, “r”, etc., are variables which give general expression to certain formal relations.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

343. “Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult ‘What is that?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

344. “A particular method of symbolizing may be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing. And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

345. “It is possible – indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic – to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

346. “Let us not forget this: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

347. “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

348. “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein