Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

I don't like mimicking people. I don't like repeating talking points. I don't like arguing with people just to argue. I like actually coming up with an interesting thing to say that I don't think has been said before in that way.

He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

My whole life is a contradiction on purpose - to make you think. I think people have forgetten how to have their own opinions. They're always waiting for someone to tell them what to do and what to wear - it's so boring.

Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

Think your own thoughts.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

I've always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

The point of a philosophical spirit is to rely primarily upon one's own thinking.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.