Quotes By Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

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.

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 man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

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

The world is independent of my will.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

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.

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

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.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

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.

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

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

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

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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.