Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosopher

1889-04-26

Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 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.

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• A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

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• The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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• 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.

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• Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.

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• The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

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• The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

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• Music conveys to us itself!

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• The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

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

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• 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.

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• Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant— so that he constantly called different things by that name— but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of —pain'— in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism

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• The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

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• 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.

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• Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.

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• 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.

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• Christianity is not a doctrine, 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 an 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.

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• The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

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• Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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• 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.

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