Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotations | Page 4

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

A picture is a model of reality.

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.

When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line and that its direction changes constantly.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

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

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

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.

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

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.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

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

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.

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.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.

Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now sixty two years old, yet just one moment ago I realised that I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread.

Freud 's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

The world is made up of facts, not things.

We learn by rearranging what we know.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

Language disguises thought.

The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.

Don't look for the meanings; look for the use.

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

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

Aim at being loved without being admired.

He who lives in the present lives in eternity.

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

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 him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

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

It is obvious that an imagined #‎ world , however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

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.