Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true i.e. It is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language game.

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. ... (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)

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.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.

Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

Understand or die.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.