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Ludwig Wittgenstein
197 quotes
“So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition
“What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pt II, p. 226 of the 1968 English edition
“If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes .”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the end of reasons comes persuasion.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1929, p. 1
“A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A confession has to be part of your new life.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? — Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aim at being loved without being admired.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) said by 1951 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source