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
Topics: Prison
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language, Words
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
Topics: Snow, Winners
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Simplicity
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn’t show he’s been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently—and tolerantly—to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Injury
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
Topics: Philosophy
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language
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
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking, Thought
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
Topics: Understanding, Meaning
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Speech, Conversation
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
Topics: Humor
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Understanding
It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Religion
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Eternity
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Deception
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
—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
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking
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
Topics: Philosophy
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
Topics: Insanity
The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language, Words
Man has to awaken to wonder—and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Science
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Decisions, Logic
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Intelligence
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Health, Body
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Religion
Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Progress
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Ludwig von Mises Austrian Economist
- Karl Popper Austrian-born British Philosopher
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Henri Bergson French Philosopher
- Franz Kafka Austrian Novelist
- Franz Grillparzer Austrian Dramatist
- Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich Austrian Political leader
- Alfred Adler Austrian Psychiatrist
- Viktor Frankl Austrian Psychiatrist
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