Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Not every religion has to have St. Augustines 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 doesnt prevent it being a religious ceremony.

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.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didnt find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

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.

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.

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.

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

The world is independent of my will.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

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

“Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”

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