Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.”

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

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

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

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

“Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112The 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.”

“6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.6.4311Death 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.”

“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 face is the soul of the body.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“Don't think, but look! (PI 66)”

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

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

“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 give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.”

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“There can never be surprises in logic.”

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

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

“Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.”

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

“Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.”

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Only describe, don't explain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

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