Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Austrian philosopher and logician (1889–1951)

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Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.

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Native Name: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

Alternative Names: Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein • Wittgenstein

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It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Understand or die.

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

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

There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.

When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.

Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....

Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.