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Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

1889–1951 Austria

Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.

Austria
Academics
Authors
Logicians
Philosophers

Also known as: Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Random Ludwig Wittgenstein quote

192 quotes

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Culture and Value (1980)

The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

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?

Culture and Value (1980)

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

Culture and Value (1980)

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

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

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

There is no religious denomination in which so much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical expressions as in mathematics.

Culture and Value (1977)

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Culture and Value (1980)

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

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ludwig Wittgenstein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.