Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

228 Quotes on Self-Deception, Wisdom, Life, Death, and Existence's Mysteries

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 39e

Source: Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore

As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109
Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.
Attributed from posthumous publications

Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e

Attributed from posthumous publications

Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
1930s-1951

Variant: You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 52e

387.
On Certainty (1969)

Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 45

5.5571
Original German: Wenn ich die Elementarsätze nicht a priori angeben kann, dann muss es zu offenbarem Unsinn führen, sie angeben zu wollen.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

5.632
Original German: Das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern es ist eine Grenze der Welt.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 56e

Variant translation: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Original German: Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Context: It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 76e

As quoted in "A View from the Asylum" in Philosophical Investigations from the Sanctity of the Press (2004), by Henry Dribble, p. 87
Attributed from posthumous publications

On Certainty (1969)

Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.
I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.
A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death.
Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 165
Corresponding to TS 213, Kapitel 87, 409

4.442
Original German: Ein Satz kann unmöglich von sich selbst aussagen, dass er wahr ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Journal entries (12 March 1915 and 15 March 1915) p. 41e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!!
That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

Original German:Die Logik erfüllt die Welt; die Grenzen der Welt sind auch ihre Grenzen. Wir können also in der Logik nicht sagen: Das und das gibt es in der Welt, jenes nicht.Das würde nämlich scheinbar voraussetzen, dass wir gewisse Möglichkeiten ausschließen, und dies kann nicht der Fall sein, da sonst die Logik über die Grenzen der Welt hinaus müsste; wenn sie nämlich diese Grenzen auch von der anderen Seite betrachten könnte. Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also auch nicht sagen, was wir nicht denken können.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. (5.61)

He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.
6.54
Original German: Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Variant translation: Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions." but to make propositions clear.
Original German: Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken. Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit. Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen. Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht „philosophische Sätze“, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen. Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

Remarks to John Wisdom, quoted in Zen and the Work of WIttgenstein by Paul Weinpaul in The Chicago Review Vol. 12, (1958), p. 70
Attributed from posthumous publications

Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.
4.464
Original German: Die Wahrheit der Tautologie ist gewiss, des Satzes möglich, der Kontradiktion unmöglich
Source: 1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 44e

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183

1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy (chapters 86–93 of the so called Big Typescript), p. 161
Corresponding to TS 213, Kapitel 86
Context: 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. ]

On Certainty (1969)
Context: 105. 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 the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

On Certainty (1969)

Conversation of 1947 or 1948
Personal Recollections (1981)

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
Context: A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

1.1
Original German: Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e
Context: A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye.
For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

On Certainty (1969)
Context: 105. 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 the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 5e
Context: Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

§ 454
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Context: "Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
Context: Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

On Certainty (1969)
Context: 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.

On Certainty (1969)

Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

7
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Also: About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. (7)
Source: 1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

The microcosm.
5.63
Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Variant: Man is the microcosm:
I am my world.

Variant: If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 42e

Source: On Certainty (1969)

Source: Philosophical Investigations

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.
§ 109
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Source: On Certainty

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus