Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

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

A picture is a fact.

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.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

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 it.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.

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

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.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

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.

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.