Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

Ambition is the death of thought.

"If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative."

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?

[T]he enigma of the continuum arises because language misleads us into applying to it a picture that doesn’t fit. Set theory preserves the inappropriate picture of something discontinuous, but makes statements about it that contradict the picture, under the impression that it is breaking with prejudices; whereas what should really have been done is to point out that the picture just doesn’t fit…

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only strictly correct method.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.

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.