Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

I'd like to do policy and I'd like to do philosophy, I'd like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument - that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

You need philosophy. It sounds a little pompous but I think when you direct a film, the only way to find a response to the questions you keep asking yourself is to have a philosophy.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

There is nothing higher than reason.

Our age is bent on trying to make the barren tree of skepticism fruitful by tying the fruits of truth on its branches.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said--and did not say.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.

The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.