Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody,that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Life is like an analogy.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.