Wittgenstein, Richard

"The noble example shows the way, but it does not compel the will."

"Wittgenstein's ladder: climb up it, and then kick it away."

"A good way of philosophizing is to show people that they are not thinking clearly."

"What ties the shoe? Not the knot, but the shoelace itself."

"Whereof one cannot speak—one must be silent. This is the highest truth."

"The language-game is the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven."

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."

"The demand for certainty is one of the great philosophical errors."

"Philosophers are often like little children who must learn to walk all over again."

"We make mistakes because we allow ourselves to be bewitched by language."

"It is almost like a disease: the desire to understand everything."

"A name is a kind of tool. Just as a hammer is a tool for driving nails, a name is a tool for meaning."

"The elementary proposition should not be difficult to understand, but it is fundamental."

"Showing how to get past a philosophical problem is like leading someone out of a dark room."

"One could imagine someone arguing that thinking is never passive; it is always an activity."

"Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror of the world."

"When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist."

"A simile that has been used for a long time ceases to have any stimulating effect on the imagination."

"Culture and value stand on a much narrower base than we are inclined to think."

"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence—with dignity and grace."

"The world is everything that is the case."

"Belief in God is not a scientific question but a matter of decision."

"A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a fly in a bottle. Philosophy is the movement that lets the fly out."

"It is difficult to overstate how much of ordinary language is metaphorical."

"The purpose of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the bottle."

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

"My model is the form of this or that proposition, not the proposition itself."

"A picture holds us captive, and we cannot get outside of it, for it lies in our language and language seems to repeat it to us inexorably."

"The sense of the world must lie outside of the world."

"We are bewitched by one picture in our minds."