A biography for Ludwig Wittgensteinhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
“It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.”
“The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.”
“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.”
“If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.”
“A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.”
“Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.”
“A confession has to be part of your new life.”
“Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.”
“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”
“You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
“The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.”
“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
“Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”
“לאחר כמה ניסיונות כושלים לרתך את התוצאות שלי לכלל שלם אחד שכזה, נוכחתי שלעולם לא יעלה הדבר בידי; שהמיטב שביכולתי יישאר רק בגדר הערות פילוסופיות; שמחשבותיי דועכות במהירות אם אני מנסה לכפות עליהן התקדמות בכיוון אחד בניגוד לנטייתן הטבעית.”
“כאשר אני חושב בשפה, לא עולות על דעתי 'משמעויות' המתווספות אל הביטוי המילולי; אלא השפה עצמה היא כלי החשיבה.”
“אנו מצפים לדבר הזה ומופתעים מהדבר ההוא; אבל לשרשרת הנימוקים יש סוף.”