Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church.... Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.

When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.

Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself. (Wittgenstein commenting on Sartre's Hell is other people.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

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

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it-or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.

Think, for example, of the words which you perhaps utter in this space of time. They are no longer part of this language. And in different surroundings the institution of money doesn't exist either.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their familiarity and simplicity.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.