Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

“Life can be a misunderstanding, if we are ignorant of the right language or don’t try to learn it. « If lions could speak, we would not understand them. » says Ludwig Wittgenstein. If we make an effort, however, we could manage to understand. ( “ Life was a misunderstanding » )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”
― Rudolf Carnap, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 11

“Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“He was of the opinion... that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.

{Von Wright on his tutor, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein}”
― Georg Henrik von Wright

“Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.”
― Gregory Bateson

“when Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: 'All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning!”
― Apostolos Doxiadis, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

“Philosophy is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered; it is a question of what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge.

[Moritz Schlick interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's position]”
― Moritz Schlick

“The things that cannot be talked about logically are the only ones which are truly important.”
― Apostolos Doxiadis, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

“The meaning of the world does not reside in the world.”
― Apostolos Doxiadis, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

“An even more important philosophical contact was with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began as my pupil and ended as my supplanter at both Oxford and Cambridge. He had intended to become an engineer and had gone to Manchester for that purpose. The training for an engineer required mathematics, and he was thus led to interest in the foundations of mathematics. He inquired at Manchester whether there was such a subject and whether anybody worked at it. They told him about me, and so he came to Cambridge. He was queer, and his notions seemed to me odd, so that for a whole term I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric. At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: “Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?” I replied, “My dear fellow, I don’t know. Why are you asking me?” He said, “Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.” I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him: “No, you must not become an aeronaut.” And he didn’t.
The collected papers of Bertrand Russell: Last Philosophical Testament”
― Bertrand Russell

“Money corrupts so, best give it to the already corrupted.”
― Apostolos Doxiadis, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

“In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.
And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Like the positivists, Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics. But he attacked metaphysics not with a blunt instrument like the verification principle, but by the careful drawing of distinctions that enable him to disentangle the mixture of truism and nonsense within metaphysical systems. ‘When philosophers use a word—‘‘knowledge’’, ‘‘being’’, ‘‘object’’, ‘‘I’’, ‘‘proposition’’, ‘‘name’’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI I, 116).”
― Anthony Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern World