Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition in favour of rationality, where we are inclined to use it, is just that - an intuition. Reason is founded in intuition and ends in intuition, like a pair of massive bookends.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.

In other philosophies, my questions would get answered to some degree, but then I would have a follow-up question and there would be no answer. The logic would dead-end. In Scientology you can find answers for anything you could ever think to ask. These are not pushed off on you as, 'This is the answer, you have to believe in it.' In Scientology you discover for yourself what is true for you.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

We must re-center philosophy within our frame of reference which I think is the way to deal with it.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.