Wittgenstein, Ludwig

"Knowledge is not something humans are born with; it must be acquired through experience."

"The more narrowly we examine language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement."

"Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation."

"One must always be ready to start thinking at any moment."

"The word is the picture of the world."

"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus contains no genuine philosophy."

"All that we call human history—is the history of the struggle for recognition."

"The good life is characterized by peace and order."

"A question that cannot be posed clearly cannot be answered clearly."

"The feeling of mystical wonder at the world is the deepest root of all science."

"Just as we can learn a language by ear without studying grammar, so we can understand art without understanding its theory."

"The human spirit will not be bound by causal chains."

"What is the object of philosophy? To show the fly out of the bottle."

"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched."

"The world is determined by facts, and by all the facts being the case, and by nothing else."

"Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent; but wherever one can speak meaningfully, one should do so carefully."

"Mysticism is not how the world is, but that it is."

"There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas."

"Beauty is the beauty of a form."

"One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to waste it, to use it badly, fills me with apprehension."

"The only possibility of anything like a philosophy of biology can lie in the understanding of life itself."

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death."

"To imagine a language different from ours is to imagine a different form of life."

"The proposition is a measure of reality."

"Ethical reward and punishment must be something else than pleasure and pain."

"One cannot be recognized in the mirror of nature, only in the mirror of human understanding."

"A man is a microcosm, a little world."

"The facts in logical space are the world."

"Wisdom is not something you can learn by listening; it is earned through living."

"The only way to avoid being misunderstood is not to communicate."