Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.
It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?
This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.
The world is everything that is the case.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
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.
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.
Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.
The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.
This is how philosophers should salute each other: "Take your time."
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.
Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Don't think, but look!
You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself
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?"
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
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.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing... If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.