Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.

I am now in another hole, though I have to say, it is no better than the old one. Living with human beings is hard!

There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a proposition is a position in the game of language.

At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.

Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science.

Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: I wish you luck. I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me. And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion

A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

5.641 [...] Das philosophische Ich ist nicht der Mensch, nicht der menschliche Körper, oder die menschliche Seele, von der die Psychologie handelt, sondern das metaphysische Subjekt, die Grenze - nicht ein Teil - der Welt.

Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.

Es ist offenbar, dass auch eine von der wirklichen noch so verschieden gedachte Welt Etwas -- eine Form -- mit der wirklichen gemein haben muss.

We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don't get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.

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

Self-evidence, of which Russell has said so much, can only be discarded in logic by language itself preventing every logical mistake. That logic is a priori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically.

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

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