Ludwig Wittgenstein
230 quotes
Biography
"A confession has to be part of your new life."
"Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important."
"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."
"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
"The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves."
"I am my world."
"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 him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy."
"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."
"Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery."
"The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long."
"How small a thought it takes to fill a life."
"If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God."
"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all."
"An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."
"Don't think, but look! (PI 66)"
"Language disguises thought."
"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."
"Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."
"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."
"There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads."
"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical."
"Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us."
"The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language."
"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved."
"It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German."