Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

I don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.

Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.

You need not wonder at my knowing all human languages; for, to tell you the truth, I also understand all the secrets of human silence.

The most profound statements are often said in silence.

The most profound things are inexpressible.

The real secrets are not the ones I tell.

The inarticulate speak longest.

Silence is a universal language. It's like music or painting.

In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

Even silence is so articulate at times.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Truth is more than a mental exercise.

Some secrets should never turn into confessions. I know that better than anyone.

Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

All our knowledge originates in opinion.

There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

The wise man knows of all things, as far as possible, although he has no knowledge of each of them in detail

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

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

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all the stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them--

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?