Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning.

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.

Language disguises thought.

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.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

Tell me, Wittgenstein's asked a friend, why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating? His friend replied, Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. Wittgenstein replied, Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?