Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary in color and context according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

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

To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.

Well, what does "good" mean anyway? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation."

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

Why, you might just as well say that, I see what I eat, is the same as, I eat what I see.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.

The word impossible is peculiar because if you examine it closely, you'll find that most of it is possible.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Here the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.

I remember having a discussion with [Kaz] about his translation of the word shunyata as "boundlessness," instead of the more traditional "emptiness." I said: "Kaz, everyone is used to the word emptiness for shunyata. This might not sit well with people. He said: "Translator's prerogative!" Then he added, "One cannot assume we know what they meant...." I agreed.