Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes on Philosophy

73 quotes

1. My difficulty is only an - enormous - difficulty of expression. (p. 40)

2. I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts. (p. 41)

3. One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches. (p. 60)

5. What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists.

6. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

7. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

9. Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

10. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

11. That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

13. The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

14. The world is all that is the case. (1)

15. The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)

16. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)

17. The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)

19. 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. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

20. It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)

23. If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)

24. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6)

25. Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, 'The world has this in it, and this, but not that.' For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. (5.61)

27. The world and life are one. (5.621)

28. I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)

31. It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

32. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)

33. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

34. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.

36. The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term. (p. 19)

38. What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms? (p. 26)

39. But ordinary language is all right. (p. 28)

40. The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. (p. 45)

41. What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities.

42. 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.

43. The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water. (p.183)

44. The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway. (p.187)

45. 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?' (p.193)

47. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. #109

48. What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. #116

49. What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood. #118

51. If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.' (217)

52. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (129)

53. 'Everything is already there in....' How does it come about that [an] arrow points ? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - 'No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that.' - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it. (454)

54. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. (464)

55. But if you say: 'How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?' then I say: 'How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?' (504)

56. What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

57. Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays? (467)

60. 1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

61. 94. But 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.

63. 205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

64. 206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say 'yes' to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say 'I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same.'

65. 225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

69. 378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

72. 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? (p. 14e)

73. I read: 'philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...'. What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever? (p. 15e)

74. 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? (p. 17e)

89. It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. (p. 75e)

91. Ambition is the death of thought. (p. 77e)

98. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves. (p. 131)

101. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.' (p. 578)

102. 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life' (p. 579)

105. A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

106. A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

115. If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

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

120. 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.

122. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

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

124. 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.

126. Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

127. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

130. The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

132. The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

133. 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.

135. What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

137. 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.

All Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes