Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-born British philosopher, logician, engineer, and architect. Regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Wittgenstein’s work on the philosophy of logical positivism and language greatly influenced later British and American philosophy.
Born in Vienna into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, Wittgenstein studied mechanical engineering at Berlin and at Manchester, where he did research on aeronautics and designed a jet-reaction propeller.
After reading Bertrand A. Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903) Wittgenstein abandoned his engineering research and studied mathematical logic at Cambridge under Russell, who said approvingly that Wittgenstein “soon knew all that I had to teach.”
Wittgenstein then turned to the study of language and its relationship to the world. His two major works are Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (1921; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) and Philosophische Untersuchungen (published posthumously in 1953; Philosophical Investigations.) He argued that words—and language in general—take on different roles depending on the context in which they are used and that they do not have definite intrinsic meanings.
Many of Wittgenstein’s notebooks and manuscripts have been posthumously published—Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956,) The Blue and Brown Books (1958,) Philosophische Bemerkungen (1964,) and On Certainty (1969.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Speech, Conversation
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Tragedy
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: Winners, Snow
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Happiness
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
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: Meaning, Understanding
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy, Comedy
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Body, Health
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Deception
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Manners, Behavior
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
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Photography
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Intelligence
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
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
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: Thinking, Thoughts, Thought
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: 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: Philosophy, Philosophers
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
Topics: Birth
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
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
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
If you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Certainty
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Language, Words
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
A confession has to be part of your new life.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Honesty
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: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Dreams
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
Topics: Religion
He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: The Present
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
—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
Topics: Philosophy
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Decisions, Logic
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Topics: Logic
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
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