The Best Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture is a model of reality. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A logical picture of facts is a thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

White must be the lightest color in a picture. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved… it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Freud’s fanciful pseudo–explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in ‘explaining’ symptoms of an illness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What can be shown, cannot be said. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig Wittgenstein — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ambition is the death of thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

How small a thought it takes to fill a life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I give no sources because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Suppose we think while we talk or write––I mean, as we normally do––we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. …Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Dark’ and ‘blackish’ are not the same concept. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don’t look for the meanings; look for the use. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

At the end of reasons comes persuasion. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

He who lives in the present lives in eternity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The depressed man lives in a depressed world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?––In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?––Or is the use its life? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What has to be accepted, the given, is–so one could say–forms of life . — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Here the term ‘language–game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

There can never be surprises in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror–image of the world. Logic is transcendental. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The so–called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.––Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is possible––indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic––to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

What is your aim in philosophy?–––to shew the fly the way out of the fly–bottle. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.–Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’ (though not in Mauthner’s sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I’m doing philosophy like an old woman, first I’m looking for my pencil, then I’m looking for my glasses, then I’m looking for my pencil again. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A main cause of philosophical disease–an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein