Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Il senso della vita, cioè il senso del mondo, possiamo chiamarlo Dio. Pregare è pensare al senso della vita.

One cannot reasonably be angry even at Hitler, let alone at God.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

144. 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.

لا شيء أصعب من تجنب خداع المرء لنفسه.

I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.

You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Logic precedes every experience — that something is so.

The thought is the significant proposition. (4)

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. 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.

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

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. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)