Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

Being that can be understood is language.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Experience is always larger than language.

We see only what we have names for.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.