Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

The face is the soul of the body.

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

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

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

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

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

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

A picture is a fact.

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

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

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

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

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

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

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

The world is independent of my will.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

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

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.