The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. 2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. 2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The same operation which makes “q” from “p”, makes “r” from “q”, and so on. This can only be expressed by the fact that “p”, “q”, “r”, etc., are variables which give general expression to certain formal relations.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word ‘pain’ meant – so that he constantly called different things by that name – but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’ – in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A particular method of symbolizing may be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing. And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The war saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Let us not forget this: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our motto might be: “Let us not be bewitched”.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein
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