Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

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

Language is memory and metaphor.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

So, sometimes, when I'm not happy with my performance and I have to think, I will think in English.

To live is to think.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.