Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes - Page 8

You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.

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

The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

White must be the lightest color in a picture.

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?

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

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

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

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

How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . .

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.