Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.

My mind gets into a verbal mode.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

I like the cerebral process.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

One of the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

Sometimes you have to think about what you're going to say, in real life, so when you see that thought process going on in a movie, it feels real and looks real.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

Whatever I write in email, it doesn't mean anything. It is just words I write.

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

You think, you don't just speak. The lines come off the thoughts.

People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

The best clue to what a person thinks is what he says.

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.