Ludwig Wittgenstein – 17 Quotes

17 Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn’t find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.’

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

– Ludwig Wittgenstein