Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

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.

Me siento inclinado a decir que la expresión lingüística correcta del milagro de la existencia del mundo -a pesar de no ser una proposición en el lenguaje- es la existencia del lenguaje mismo

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!

What is internal is hidden from us. The future is hidden from us. But does the astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun? If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.

we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.

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.

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him off to sleep again.

Our motto might be: Let us not be bewitched.

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.

If we hear a Chinese we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot recognize the human being in someone etc.

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

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.

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.

Das Spiel des Zweifelns selbst setzt schon die Gewißheit voraus.

La Ética, en tanto surge del deseo de decir algo acerca del significado último de la vida, del bien absoluto, de lo absolutamente valioso, no puede ser una ciencia. Lo que dice no le agrega nada a nuestro conocimiento en ningún sentido. Pero es un testimonio de una tendencia de la mente humana que yo, personalmente, no puedo si no respetar profundamente y que no ridiculizaría jamás, aunque mi vida dependiera de ello

My life consists in my being content to accept many things.

The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming vacuous. — We have got on to 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!