Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

5.641 [...] Das philosophische Ich ist nicht der Mensch, nicht der menschliche Körper, oder die menschliche Seele, von der die Psychologie handelt, sondern das metaphysische Subjekt, die Grenze - nicht ein Teil - der Welt.

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.

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

The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression.

Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent.”

It was an awful thought to go and sit there among logical positivists ...

a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

We must plow through the whole of language.

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 as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden.]

I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you can’t say.
[Drury, Conversation with Wittgenstein, p174]

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.