Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

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?

There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.

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.

"Suppose that the colour struck you as brighter on one day than on another; would you sometimes say: "I must be wrong, that colour is certainly the same as yesterday"? This shews that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal."

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their
role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning
any explicit rules.

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were
hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid;
and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became
fluid.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

...the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.

Language disguises thought.

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.

Der Satz der Mathematik drückt keinen Gedanken aus.