Ludwig Wittgenstein

:For other people of this name, see Wittgenstein (disambiguation)

Quotations

• Proposition 6.54 from the Tractatus: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) ... He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly." This conception is sometimes referred to as "Wittgenstein's Ladder".
• The final proposition from the Tractatus, numbered 7: Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, translated as: "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence" or "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
• From the introduction to the Tractatus: "...the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable..."
• The later Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
• PI §109: "We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place."
• "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
• "If one tries to advance 'theses' (i.e. theories) in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them."
• "The answer to every philosophical question is a truism."
• "The world is all that is the case."
• "The object is colourless."
• "Superstition is the belief in a causal nexus."
• "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything."
• Philosophical Investigations § 281 "But doesn't what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behaviour? It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious."
• "The world we live in is the words we use."
• "The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results."
• "What is spoken can only be explained in language, and so in this sense language itself cannot be explained."