Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word 'philosophy' must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.
Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
A property is internal if it is unthinkable that its object should not possess it.
We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference.
Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.
The world and life are one.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as l found it , I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.
The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.
Mathematics is a method of logic.
The law of causality is not a law but the form of a law.
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
… the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility.
When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist.
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy--and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein