Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

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

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

(on Sartre) Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

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.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

The face is the soul of the body.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

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.

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

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

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

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.

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.

For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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