Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy of language
Sayings by Ludwig Wittgenstein
What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
My mind is not like a machine, but like a hand. Its job is to make things, not to analyze them.
A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about.'
The riddle does not exist.
Not to understand a grammar is to be unable to understand an idiom.
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life has become clear, after living for some time, have then found no reason to go on living?)
The limits of the world are also my limits.
Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death.
Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Is it not a strange phenomenon that in the most highly developed civilizations, people are still afraid of the truth?
The meaning is not the experience accompanying the word.
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to master a technique.
The cinematic film is a picture language. And it is obvious that it does not need to be translated into our language of words.
One cannot think with an empty head.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one's eyes.)
Genius is courage.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's always ajar, feeling that he might be able to get out, and all he has to do is step outside.
We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.