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

Explore Ludwig Wittgenstein's profound insights on self-deception, wisdom, the meaning of life, death, and the mysteries of existence. Embrace logic and silliness in our journey towards understanding the complexities of the human intellect.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher known for his work in logic, mathematics, mind, and language. He is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Although he only published one book during his lifetime, his posthumously published work, Philosophical Investigations, is highly regarded and was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy. Wittgenstein's philosophy evolved over time, with his early period focused on logical relationships between propositions and the world, and his later period emphasizing the use of words within a given language game.

Born into a wealthy family in Vienna, Wittgenstein inherited a fortune but gave it away to his siblings during a period of personal depression after World War I. He experienced various career paths throughout his life, including serving as an officer in World War I and working in schools and hospitals. Despite experiencing personal struggles and family tragedies, Wittgenstein devoted himself to philosophy and made significant contributions to the field with his innovative ideas and writings.

✵ 26. April 1889 – 29. April 1951   •   Other names Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein: 228   quotes 284   likes

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

“I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Way

“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Comment to Maurice O'Connor Drury, as quoted in Wittgenstein Reads Freud : The Myth of the Unconscious (1996) by Jacques Bouveresse, as translated by Carol Cosman, p. 14
Attributed from posthumous publications

God , Religion

“The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i. e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Preface
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Books , Thinking

“310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

Sense , Teachers

“Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Thinking

“Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: 1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 75

God

“We must plow through the whole of language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
Attributed from posthumous publications

Men , Search , Question

“The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 91e

Time

“205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

Falseness

“A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Conversation of 1930
Personal Recollections (1981)

Parting

“One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 98e

Age , Way

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Understanding

“I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Water

“You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

1929, p. 1
Culture and Value (1980)

Tree

“You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions…. I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,…". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 15e

People , Understanding , Question , Problem

“The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 19

Idea , Understanding , Help

“612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

“The less somebody knows and understand himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 51e

Understanding

“Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Conversation of 1930
Similar to Wittgenstein's written notes of the "Big Typescript" published in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, p. 175: 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.
Personal Recollections (1981)

“Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.51
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Question

“What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 116
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 219
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 8e

Time

“What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Imagination

“A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Pt II, p. 189
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Thinking

“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — 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?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 17e

Children , Time , Housing

“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

2
Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

“The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Though this has been quoted extensively as if it were a statement of Wittgenstein, it was apparently first published in A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking, p. 175, where it is presented in quotation marks and thus easily interpreted to be a quotation, but could conceivably be Hawking paraphrasing or giving his own particular summation of Wittgenstein's ideas, as there seem to be no published sources of such a statement prior to this one. The full remark by Hawking reads:
: Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
Disputed

“Aim at being loved without being admired.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 38e

Love

“The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 41e

Truth , Home

“If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 24e

“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:
: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed

World

“Ambition is the death of thought.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 77e

Death

“One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Culture and Value (1980)

Art , Nature

“A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in…”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Remarks (1930), Part I (1)
1930s-1951

“Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 66
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Game , Thinking

“You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

On his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) by C. Grant Luckhard
1910s

Understanding , Reality , Reading , Parting

“If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 53e

Life , Thinking , Change

“"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Notes of 1919, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk
1910s

Sense

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

Pt II, p. 178
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Soul

“I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 33e

Effort

“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

that does not occur to them.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e

People , Pleasure , Idea , Thinking

“If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 60e

Life , Thinking

“"Fare well!"
"A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 52e

Pain , World , Tree

“Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 53e

Religion , Sea

“If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Travel

“Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 35e

Sleep

“So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 261
Philosophical Investigations (1953)