Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists - in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

I am - since I was a child - curious about everything. I like to look at how things work and why people are the way they are.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility, he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

I have no perfect panacea for human ills. And even if I had I would not attempt to present a system of philosophy between the soup and fish.

When all else fails, philosophize.

The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.

The young child approaching a new subject or anew problem is like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field.