Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.

"Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?"

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

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

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

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.