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I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I am my world.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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How small a thought it takes to fill a life.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Don't think, but look! (PI 66)Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. .Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112 The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions", but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Language disguises thought.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silenceLudwig Wittgenstein
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Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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 going without food and drink.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant–so that he constantly called different things by that name–but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’–in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism .Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Music conveys to us itself!Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. 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.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment. .Ludwig Wittgenstein
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At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common.( Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)Ludwig Wittgenstein
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For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The limits of my language means the limits of my world.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The limits of your language are the limits of your world.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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An entire mythology is stored within our language.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.) Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....Ludwig Wittgenstein
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476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc., etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc., etc. Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite? For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late? .Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the groovesLudwig Wittgenstein
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Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a hereticLudwig Wittgenstein
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Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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 deludedLudwig Wittgenstein
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If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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There can never be surprises in logic.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an "illogical" world would look like.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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 oneLudwig Wittgenstein
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Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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
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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, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me. And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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He who lives in the present lives in eternity.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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.Ludwig Wittgenstein
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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