(1889 - 1951)
Resolving to live a simple life, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away his inherited wealth in 1919 and spent six years teaching elementary students in the mountains of rural Austria. After hours, the philosopher slept in the school kitchen. In a 1912 letter to philosopher Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein called Mozart and Beethoven “the actual sons of god.”
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1947Miscellany
Concluding that he and Bertrand Russell possessed irreconcilable “value judgments,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Russell on March 3, 1914, to suggest that a continued correspondence could only be achieved by “restricting our relationship to the communication of facts capable of being established objectively, with perhaps also some mention of our friendly feelings for one another.”
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915Miscellany
Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed in 1947, “A typical American film, naive and silly, can—for all its silliness and even by means of it—be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learned a lesson from a silly American film.”
