Ludwig Wittgenstein on Life

"I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment."

"What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life."

"Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep."

"I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life."

"We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming."

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

"A confession has to be part of your new life."

"What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts."

"Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

"The world and life are one."

"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."

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it."

"105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life."