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

“253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

Source: On Certainty (1969)

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Question

“The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.43
Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

World , Happiness

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Imagination , Support

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? p. 17e

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Ludwig Wittgenstein / Quotes / Culture and Value (1980)
1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
Source: Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951

Children

“Language disguises thought.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value

Feeling , Home

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Source: Philosophical Investigations

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

Source: On Certainty (1969)

Game

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (13 October 1914), also in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§ 5.47)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

“The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Life

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Indifference

“If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Pt II, p. 162
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Context: One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Personality , Falseness

“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Tell them I've had a wonderful life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Last words, to his doctor's wife (28 April 1951)–as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100
1930s-1951

Life

“This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Time

“This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Business

“If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 217
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

Knowledge

“The face is the soul of the body.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Source: Philosophical Investigations

Soul

“Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Zettel

Beauty , Imagination

“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Zettel

Communication , Idea

“The world is everything that is the case.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: The world is all that is the case.
Context: The world is all that is the case. (1)

World

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value

Thinking

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 129
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Context: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

“It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (14 May 1915), p. 48
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Parting

“It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Life , Hope , Music

“My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 464
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

As quoted in "Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious" by Roe Fremstedal in Ideas in History Vol. 1 (2006) http://www.ideasinhistory.org/cms/index.php?page=wittgenstein-and-kierkegaard-on-the-ethico-religious
Attributed from posthumous publications

“One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent.”
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 38e

Exercises , Courage

“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (1 May 1915)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Question

“It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Conversation of 1934
Personal Recollections (1981)

Wisdom

“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119

Error

“I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31
1910s

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 112
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Reality

“I can well understand why children love sand.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Although this quote has been attributed to Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, there is no verifiable source from Wittgenstein that it can be traced back to.
Disputed

Love , Children , Understanding

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 120
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Question , Thinking

“I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

As I myself read.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 77e

Reading , Speed

“370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know…"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.
On Certainty (1969)