Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

Any serious philosophy can be described entirely through jokes.

an inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.

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

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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.

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

Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red — and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue — and no one should be allowed to read them.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

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.

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.

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

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit -not a part of the world. [...] If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

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

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all...

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.

We have got onto 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!

If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.

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

The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.