Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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

A picture is a model of reality.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly .

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

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.

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.

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.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

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.

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

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

The world is the totality of facts, not of things

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

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.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

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?

Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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

A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.

Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, 'The walls of my room should be painted this color.

There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.

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

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.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

The form is the possibility of the structure.

White must be the lightest color in a picture.

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept.

If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest.

I am my world.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

Elementary propositions consist of names.

The world divides into facts.

Talent is a spring from which fresh water always flows.- But this spring is worthless if no good use is made of it.

The world is everything that is the case.

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.

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.