Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words. - (Where I'm Likely To Find It)

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.