110+ Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes On Language, Logical And Analytical

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher and logician who worked primarily in the 20th century. He is considered one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his work has had a major impact on the fields of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein is best known for his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein on language, logical, analytical.

Top 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

1. Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
2. The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
3. If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
4. The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
5. I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
6. The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
7. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
8. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
9. We learn by rearranging what we know.
10. A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Image Quotes

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

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language means the limits of my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Short Quotes

• He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
• A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
• Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
• For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
• This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.
• Don't look for the meanings; look for the use.
• We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.
• What is thinkable is also possible.
• When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
• Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About Language

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

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

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

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

An entire mythology is stored within our language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About Logical

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

There can never be surprises in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A logical picture of facts is a thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About World

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The depressed man lives in a depressed world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is obvious that an imagined #‎ world , however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man is the microcosm: I am my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

That the world is, is the mystical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line and that its direction changes constantly. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About Philosophy

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About Word

All I know is what I have words for. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tell them I've had a wonderful life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

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

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes About Logic

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.--Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

All propositions are of equal value. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Elementary propositions consist of names. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language means the limits of my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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). — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Life Lessons by Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein taught that the meaning of words and language can only be understood in the context of the culture and society in which they are used. This encourages us to be mindful of the language we use and to be aware of the potential implications of our words.
2. Wittgenstein also taught that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, encouraging us to think beyond the boundaries of language and to explore other ways of understanding the world around us.
3. Finally, Wittgenstein taught that the only way to truly understand something is to experience it for oneself, encouraging us to be open to new experiences and to be willing to learn from them.