569 Quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it’s having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. It is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, but that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.

The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense. – Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.

What a curious attitude scientists have: “We still don’t know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!”’ As if that went without saying.

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.

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.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.