Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Quotations

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

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

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

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

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

The face is the soul of the body.

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

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

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

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

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.

It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.

One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense....

What can be shown, cannot be said.

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.

The world is independent of my will.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

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.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

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.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

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.