Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein was Austrian-British philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on philosopher.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: 456 quotes286 likes

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments.
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i. e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

“467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

Source: On Certainty (1969)

“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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value

“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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Zettel

“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

“I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

387.
On Certainty (1969)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 69e

“Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it’s having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 86e

“One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: 1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 61

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Conversation of 1930, in Personal Recollections (1981) by Rush Rhees, Ch. 6
Variant: 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.
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 175

“It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 75e