Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Tao is beyond words and beyond things. It is not expressed either in word or in silence. Where there is no longer word or silence Tao is apprehended.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

One feels 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about.

We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other.

How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

The one religion is beyond all speech.

No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

The transcendent experience is common to every culture in the world.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

It was one of those things that had to be experienced to be understood

Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.

No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

For the Divine Being cannot be declared as it exists: but as we who are fettered in the flesh were able to listen, so the prophets spake to us; the Lord savingly accommodating Himself to the weakness of men.

By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a presence, a genius loci, a potency.