Culture and Value Quotes

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“We are struggling with language.
We are engaged in a struggle with language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Genius is talent exercised with courage.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: this is a man, this is a house, etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world - I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value