Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!

I like better for one to say some foolish thing upon important matters than to be silent. That becomes the subject of discussion and dispute, and the truth is discovered.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

I gotta use words to talk to you.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?