Ludwig Wittgenstein Language Quotations

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

We must plow through the whole of language.

A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

All propositions are of equal value.

Elementary propositions consist of names.

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

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

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

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

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

For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

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.

Language disguises thought.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.