Ludwig Wittgenstein Important Quotations

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.