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

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be on of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Conscience is the voice of God.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Some people’s taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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
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