Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
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
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
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
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
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
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
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
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
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
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
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
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
A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.
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
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
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein



