Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes:

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The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
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.
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.
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
A confession has to be part of your new life.
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.
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.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Aim at being loved without being admired.
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Ethics and aesthetics are one.
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. 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.
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
A picture is a fact.
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
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.
The world is independent of my will.
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, 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 get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
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.
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.'
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.
The depressed man lives in a depressed world.
What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.
An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
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.
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?
A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...
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.
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.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
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.
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
There can never be surprises in logic.
A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.
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.
Man is the microcosm: I am my world.
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.
It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.
Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.
The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.
We learn by rearranging what we know.
Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
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.
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time
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.
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 mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
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.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
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.
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.
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
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.
The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
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.)
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
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.
Music conveys to us itself!
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.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
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.
The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently - and tolerantly - to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.
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.
If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
All mathematics is tautology.
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
What is thinkable is also possible.
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
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.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.
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 vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
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.
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.
...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....
[M]an is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

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