Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.”

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

“I want to say: We use judgements as principlesof judegement.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“A logical picture of facts is a thought.”

“Language disguises thought.”

“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.”

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

“A confession has to be part of your new life.”

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

“Tell them I've had a wonderful life.”

“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.”

“Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“[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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 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”

“The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”

“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.”

“حينما نفكر في مستقبل العالم، فنحن نعني الغاية التي سيصلها إذا ماواصل السير في الإتجاه الذي نراه يسير فيه الأن، ولا يخطر لنا أن مساره ليس خطا مستفيما، بل هو منحنى، يغير على الدوام من اتجاهه.”

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

“Roughly speaking: objects are colourless”

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

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

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

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

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

“Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.”

“Music conveys to us itself!”

“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.”

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

“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?”