Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

“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.”

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion”

“The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is”

“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.”

“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horses good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”

“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”

“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.”

“(on Sartre) Hell isnt other people. Hell is yourself.”

“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.”

“If there were a verb meaning to believe falsely, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative”

“No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesnt show hes been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently -- and tolerantly -- to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.”

“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.”

“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

“We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.”

“One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word I.”

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”

“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).”