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Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
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.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
– 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
For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
– 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
If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.
– 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
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ''Wisdom.'' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ''Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.''
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
– 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
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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 deluded.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....
… We could say that the limits of language are the limits of the world… that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And in that respect, whatever I say must limit the world, must make it finite.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
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