Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

Commenting on his Tractatus...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

The world is independent of my will.

What a curious attitude scientists have: "We still don't know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!"' As if that went without saying.

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

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....

303. I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am.—Yes: one can make the decision to say I believe he is in pain instead of He is in pain. But that is all.——What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one. Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else's fear or pain.

11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.--What does that mean? What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.

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

What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?

What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.

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.

The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself.

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.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.

The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.

We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

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.)

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.