Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

I think that the world is very complex. I think that the movie is a good way to ask questions. To give answers, you would write a lot of books.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

"Who am I?" is not really a question because it has no answer to it; it is unanswerable. It is a device, not a question.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.