Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.6.4311Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken.Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht »philosophische Sätze«, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen.Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.4.112The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.The result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions, but to make propositions clear.Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

Language disguises thought.

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.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

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

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

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.

That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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

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.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustnt 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.

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

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 dont mean just going without food and drink.

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

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door thats unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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

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.