Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.Collection: Problem
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.Collection: Philosophy
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.Collection: Matter
Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.Collection: People
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.Collection: Long
This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.Collection: Philosopher
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.Collection: World
Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.Collection: Men
To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.Collection: Thinking
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.Collection: Home
Genius is talent exercised with courage.Collection: Genius
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.Collection: God
Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.Collection: Profound
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.Collection: Problem
At the end of reasons comes persuasion.Collection: Persuasion
Since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent.Collection: Reality
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.Collection: Decision
Aim at being loved without being admired.Collection: Aim
Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Religious
In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).Collection: Thinking
How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!Collection: Eye
One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.Collection: Self Esteem
The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.Collection: Clouds
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.Collection: Religious
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.--The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.Collection: Thinking
Ambition is the death of thought.Collection: Ambition
We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.Collection: Interpretation
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man - but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.Collection: Men
What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.Collection: Lying
What makes a subject difficult to understand if it is significant, important is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.Collection: People
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.Collection: Attitude
My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.Collection: Intelligent
Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.Collection: Thinking
The 2 timeless drivers that underpin the behavior of every generation: the need to belong and the need to be significant. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.Collection: Mean
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.Collection: Unhappy
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explainCollection: Philosophy
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.Collection: Stupid
A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.Collection: Moving
Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.Collection: Teaching
Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.Collection: Say Anything
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.Collection: Logic
There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.Collection: Color
People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.Collection: Philosophical
There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.Collection: Light
The sense of the world must lie outside the world... What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about... What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described.Collection: Lying
You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.Collection: Thinking
You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.Collection: Might
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.Collection: Games