Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

About Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953, and by the end of the century it was considered an important modern classic. His teacher Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
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Music conveys to us itself!

Ludwig Wittgenstein

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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�...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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 s...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 phil...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, woul...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just goin...

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Author Bio

  • NameLudwig Wittgenstein
  • DescriptionAustrian-British philosopher
  • AliasesLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
  • BornApril 26, 1889
  • DiedApril 29, 1951
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Austria
  • ProfessionLogician; Mathematician; Aphorist; Epistemologist; Philosopher Of Language; Analytic Philosopher; Architectural Theoretician