Ludwig Wittgenstein

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

All mathematics is tautology.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Our civilization is characterised by the word 'progress'. Progress is its form rather than making progress one of its features. Typically it…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Suppose we think while we talk or write--I mean, as we normally do--we shall not in general say that we think quicker…

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

We learn by rearranging what we know.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein