Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about.'

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language.

The inexpressible (what I find enigmatic and what I cannot express) is perhaps the background against which whatever I could express acquires meaning.

An 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria.

The difficulty is not to find the solution but to recognize the solution as the solution.

The limits of the empirical world are not empirical.

My fundamental conception is that 'logical constants' are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.

We are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and interpret them primitively.

The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things.

The game is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there everywhere holes where no rules exist and where the game can be played as one likes.

The facts of the world are not the whole truth.

The greatest danger is that of losing one's way in the labyrinth of language.

Our language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments.

One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it.

The question 'What is a word?' is analogous to 'What is a piece in chess?'

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'

A good simile is like a good joke.

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.