Ludwig Wittgenstein


The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world. That is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also. What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.


Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself. (Wittgenstein commenting on Sartre's ‘Hell is other people.’)


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


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


I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.


Anything that can be said can be said clearly.


Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.


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


Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.


I am my world.


If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.


Only describe, don't explain.


A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.


Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.


If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.


Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.


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


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.


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


We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.


Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.


Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.


How small a thought it takes to fill a life.


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


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.


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


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


I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.


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.


At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.


What can be shown, cannot be said.


For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.


It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.


The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.


Language disguises thought.


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


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.


Tell me, Wittgenstein's asked a friend, why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating? His friend replied, Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. Wittgenstein replied, Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?


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.


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


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


If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.


Tell them I've had a wonderful life.


You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself.


Don't think, but look!


If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.


An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.


Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.


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?


Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.


The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.


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


The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.


Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.


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.


Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.


One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.


That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectively or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world. What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.


Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.


Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.


If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.


If there were a verb meaning to believe falsely, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.


The face is the soul of the body.


I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.


Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!


The world is everything that is the case.


The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.


Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.


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.


I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.


Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.


The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.


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


What do I know about God and the purpose of life?

I know that this world exists.

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.

That life is the world.

That my will penetrates the world.

That my will is good or evil.

Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.

And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.


We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.


It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?


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


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


How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.


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


Perhaps what is inexpressible mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.


The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit – not a part of the world.


Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.


Philosophy hasn't made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, (what I find or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?


You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.


In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.


Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.


Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.


A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.


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.


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.


The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.


Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.


There can never be surprises in logic.


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 – that does not occur to them.


Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is purely descriptive.


In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, – and if there were, it would be of no value.


Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.


Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.


It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.


Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.


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.


Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.


Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.


If a blind man were to ask me, ‘Have you got two hands?’ – I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what?


Music conveys to us itself!


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


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.


Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.


You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a commonsense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.


There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.


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.


I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.


The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves.


I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.


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.


The meaning of a word is its use in the language.


Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.


An entire mythology is stored within our language.


If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.


A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.


Understand or die.


If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.


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


Think, for example, of the words which you perhaps utter in this space of time. They are no longer part of this language. And in different surroundings the institution of money doesn’t exist either.


The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.


What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.


We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.


Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.


Roughly speaking: objects are colorless.


A logical picture of facts is a thought.


When I came home, I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.


Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.


Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.


I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.


This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it-or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.


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


Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.


The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.


A confession has to be part of your new life.


What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.


If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.


Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface, it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed, they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.


Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course, a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.


It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’


The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of 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.


There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.


Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.


If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.


If I wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was this punch that I originally wanted.


The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.


It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how music should be played.


Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc., etc. – they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc., etc. Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, Is there such a thing as a unicorn? and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not? So, one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist. – Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite? For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge? Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists? Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?


All numbers in logic must be capable of justification. Or rather it must become plain that there are no numbers in logic. There are no pre-eminent numbers.


Telling someone something that he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not understand it. (That so often happens with someone you love.) If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from the outside!


The honorable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.


Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.


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.


At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So, people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.


There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.


The limits of your language are the limits of your world.


It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves.


If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.


[Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.


I want to say: We use judgements as principles of judgement.


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


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?


No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.


Deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.


The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression.


More wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in philosophy.


Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.


Logic is not a theory but a reflection of the world.


Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.


Indeed, how might it be if things revealed their colors only when (in our terms) no light fell on them – if, for example, the sky were black? Could we not then say, only by black light do they appear to us in their full colors?


A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.


Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.


That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence


Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train ~ Keynes


The atmosphere surrounding this problem is terrible. Dense clouds of language lie about the crucial point. It is almost impossible to get through to it.


Just be independent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it.


Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.


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


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


Genius is talent exercised with courage.


Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism.


As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.


Commenting on his ‘Tractatus’ ... It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.


The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.


The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.


The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other – he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy – but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.


What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.


Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others:


Giving orders, and obeying them

Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements

Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)

Reporting an event

Speculating about an event

Forming or teasing a hypothesis

Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams

Making up a story; and reading it

Singing catches

Guessing riddles

Making riddles

Making a joke; telling it

Solving a problem in practical arithmetic

Translating from one language into another

Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying


It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)


The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.


Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.


Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.


Reading the Socratic Dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?


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.


Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.


I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am. – Yes: one can make the decision to say ‘I believe he is in pain’ instead of ‘He is in pain’. But that is all. What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one.
Just try – in a real case – to doubt someone else's fear or pain.


What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?


To believe in God is to see that life has meaning.


In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (‘good’, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.


Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world – I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.


The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.


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


To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.


The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.


A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.


But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.


I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So, I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.


The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.
To all of them the logical structure is common. Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.


We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.


One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics. You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful – almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this – there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.) Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count.


What a curious attitude scientists have: We still don’t know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!’ As if that went without saying.


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


For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.


How do I know that someone is enchanted? How does one learn the linguistic expression of enchantment? What does it connect up with? With the expression of bodily sensations? Do we ask someone what he feels in his breast and facial muscles in order to find out whether he is feeling enjoyment? But does that mean that there aren't any sensations after all which often return when one is enjoying music? Certainly not. (In some places he is near weeping, and he feels it in his throat.) A poem makes an impression on us as we read it.


I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its color, etc. –

What does that mean? What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.


There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a proposition is a position in the game of language.


What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.


Conscience is the voice of God.


Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.


This is connected with the conception of naming as a process that is, so to speak, occult. Naming seems to be a strange connection of a word with an object. And such a strange connection really obtains, particularly when a philosopher tries to fathom the relation between name and what is named by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name, or even the word ‘this’, innumerable time. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object. And we can also say the word ‘this’ to the object, as it were address the object as ‘this’ –  a strange use of this word, which perhaps occurs only when philosophizing.


There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.


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.


The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.


Russell's books should be bound in two colors, those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.


In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.


We cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things.


When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything ... And all rites are of this kind.


Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity, are valuable in themselves.


The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.


Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.


We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don't get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.


Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.


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.


What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends.


Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.


Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.


The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice.


I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer and happy after it.


The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.


But doesn't it come out here that knowledge is related to a decision?


There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.


But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.


The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given.


And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price, and if no problems are produced by this it is harmless.)


The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again.


It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an illogical world would look like.


I am now in another hole, though I have to say, it is no better than the old one. Living with human beings is hard!


An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.


Another alternative would have been to give you what's called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don't understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.


Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.


How could human behavior be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions.


The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.


It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists at all. To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.


Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.


Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of color.


The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.


In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: I wish you luck. I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.
And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.


It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.


At the end of reasons comes persuasion.


I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you can’t say.


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


The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.


The experience which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience. Logic precedes every experience – that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What.


Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.


It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)


We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.


A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.


Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!


What is internal is hidden from us. The future is hidden from us. But does the astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun?


If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.


I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.


Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc. etc., they learn to fetch books sit in armchairs, etc., etc.


It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.


In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. There is no picture which is a priori true.


The same operation which makes q from p, makes r from q, and so on. This can only be expressed by the fact that p, q, r, etc., are variables which give general expression to certain formal relations.


Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him off to sleep again.


What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.


All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.


A particular method of symbolizing may be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing. And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.


If we hear a Chinese we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly, I often cannot recognize the human being in someone etc.


The war saved my life. I don't know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I'm standing eye to eye with death.


All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.


The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming vacuous. We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk, so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!


Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.


Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.


The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.


For the essence of the symbol cannot be altered without altering its sense.


To be considered an important event in the philosophical world.


Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystische).


The conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols; What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.


The sense of a truth-function of p is a function of the sense of p. Denial, logical addition, logical multiplication, etc. etc., are operations. (Denial reverses the sense of a proposition.)


It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin and the beginning. And not try to go further back.


Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?


That ∨, ⊃, etc., are not relations in the sense of right and left, etc., is obvious.


Either my piece is a work of the highest rank, or it is not a work of the highest rank. In the latter (and more probable) case I myself am in favor of it not being printed. And in the former case it's a matter of indifference whether it's printed twenty or a hundred years sooner or later. After all, who asks whether the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, was written in 17x or y.


Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts. (And when you see them there is a good deal that you will not say.)


If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it, it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors.


A good objection helps one forward, a shallow objection, even if it is valid, is wearisome. The objection does not seize the matter by its root, where the life is, but so far outside that nothing can be rectified even if it is wrong. A good objection helps directly towards a solution, a shallow one must first be overcome and can, from then on, be left to one side. Just as a tree bends at a knot in the trunk in order to grow on.


The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required).


In order to make an error, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind.


The world is my world: this is shown by the fact that the limits of language stand for the limits of my world…I am my world.


Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.


Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.


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.


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.


The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.


There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.


... the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.


No pain can be greater than the pain of one person. [...] In other words, no suffering can be greater than that of one human being. [...] The whole planet cannot suffer more than a lone soul.


If someone tells me he has bought the outfit of a tightrope walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it.


Tautology and contradiction are, however, not senseless; they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that 0 is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic.