Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who lived from 26 April 1889 to 29 April 1951. He focused on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is regarded as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher by some.
80 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes
- “Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.”
2. “Genius is talent exercised with courage.”
3. “The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”
4. “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”
5. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
6. “Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”
7. “Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.”
8. “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
9. “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
10. “Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.”
Famous Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes
11. “We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”
12. “Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
13. “Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”
14. “As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.”
15. “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
16. “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
17. “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
18. “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
19. “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
20. “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”
21. “How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”
22. “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”
23. “Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.”
24. “What can be shown, cannot be said.”
25. “The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice.”
26. “Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”
Mind Changing Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes
27. “The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.”
28. “If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
29. “Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”
30. “One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is. ”
31. “The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.”
32. “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”
33. “Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.”
34. “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
35. “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
36. “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.”
37. “There can never be surprises in logic.”
38. “Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.”
39. “The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given”
40. “When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.”
41. “When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote”
42. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
43. “The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.”
44. “The limits of my language are the limits of my universe”
45. “Only describe, don’t explain.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes To Live By
46. “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
47. “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence”
48. “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”
49. “The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
50. “Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.”
A Must Read: Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Author), G. E. M. Anscombe (Editor), G. H. von Wright
51. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
52. “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.”
53. “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.”
54. “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity”
56. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
57. “You can’t think decently if you’re not willing to hurt yourself”
58. “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
59. “The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.”
60. “The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again.”
61. “Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.”
62. “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”
63. “The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.”
64. “There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a “proposition” is a position in the game of language.”
65. “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”
Thought-Provoking Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes
66. “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
67. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
68. “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.”
69. “The limits of my language means the limit of my world”
70. “In order to make an error, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind.”
71. “If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”
72. “It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.”
73. “Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything. ”
74. “My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”
75. “The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.”
76. “There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.”
77. “A confession has to be part of your new life.”
78. “One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.”
79. “The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
80. “A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion”
Read more About Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein served as a Cambridge University professor from 1929 to 1947. Despite his position, only one book of his philosophy—the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (1921), which was later published with an English translation in 1922 under the Latin name Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—was ever published during his lifetime. His only other works were a children’s dictionary and an article titled “Some Remarks on Logical Form” from 1929.
His extensive manuscripts were edited and released after his passing. The 1953 publication Philosophical Investigations is the first and most well-known of this posthumous series. The Investigations, which stands out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations,” was named the most significant book of the 20th century by American university and college teachers.
Additional Read:
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) – Biography
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Turbulent Life of a Philosophical Pioneer