Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Quotes by and about Ludwig Wittgenstein

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

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

Wittgenstein: "If we take eternity to mean ... timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end."

Rudolf Carnap: "When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him. ... When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation."

Rudolf Carnap: "The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation." [Upon meeting Wittgenstein in 1927.]

Bertrand Russell: "[He] is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have."

Bertrand Russell: "The later Wittgenstein ... seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary."

Bertrand Russell: "[Wittgenstein was] the most perfect example I have known of genius: passionate, profound, intense."

Kelley L. Ross: "[Wittgenstein's] 'Tractatus' consists of aphoristic, even Delphic, statements with little argument or exposition. This would seem to be a reversion to an earlier, pre-Parmenidean era of philosophy."