Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889–1951 · Austrian philosopher and logician

Topics: learning, philosophy, creativity, software design

• You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 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.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• There is no religious denomination in which so much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical expressions as in mathematics.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein