At the age of ten he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire.
It was not true that he couldn't hear, simply that he wouldn't listen.
He took The Brothers Karamazov to the front.
Continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war.
His sense of humor was "heavy".
And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be - unutterably - contained in what has been uttered!
I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.
What we say will be easy, but to know why we say it will be very difficult.
The solution of the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem.
The inexpressible (that which seems mysterious to me, geheimnisvoll, and that I am not capable of expressing) provides the ground upon which all that I am able to express acquires meaning.
The sense of the world must lie outside the world.
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.
A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein for a positivist because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds - and this is its essence - that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about. (Paul Engelmann)
I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky.
His last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."
- Text and images from:
Ludwig Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann
