Ludwig Wittgenstein, کتاب آبی Quotes

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

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

That the world is, is the mystical.

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

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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

You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

The face is the soul of the body.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

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

The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

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

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

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

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

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.

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

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

Ambition is the death of thought.

One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.

To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

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

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.

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

The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.

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

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

Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

A picture is a model of reality.