2. Wittgenstein also said, "A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push", and, "To pray is to think about the meaning of life", and, "The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy" , and, "My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense."
3. But most remarkably, he said, "Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself", and, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", and "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits", and, "If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world", and "The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is."
4. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, was an industrialist who made his fortune in iron and steel. By the late 1880s, Karl controlled an effective monopoly on steel and iron resources within the empire, and was one of the richest men in the world. Ludwig's mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich von Hayek on her maternal side. Wittgenstein's father died in 1913. On receiving his inheritance, Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by "tragedy." "I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels," replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. Ludwig claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died.
6. According to a poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy.
7. In the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."
8. During an informal discussion between philosophers, Wittgenstein refused to discuss the Tractatus at all, and sat with his back to his guests while he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.
9. Once this happened: Popper and Wittgenstein fought over the fundamental nature of philosophy - whether there were indeed philosophical problems (Popper) or merely puzzles (Wittgenstein). Popper writes that he put forward a series of real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein summarily dismissed them all. Wittgenstein 'had been nervously playing with the poker', which he used 'like a conductor's baton to emphasize his assertions'. When a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. Popper writes, 'I replied: "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out of the room, banging the door behind him.' This story developed into one where Wittgenstein attacked Popper with a red-hot poker.
10. Ludwig impressed his musical friends with excellent whistling of classical music.
11. At school, Wittgenstein spoke with a slight stutter, wore very elegant clothes, and was highly sensitive and extremely unsociable. It was one of his idiosyncrasies to use the formal form of address with his classmates and to demand that they too (with the exception of a single acquaintance) address him formally, with "Sie" and "Herr Ludwig"
12. Bertrand Russell remarked that Ludwig Wittgenstein was- "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating" When Ludwig attacked some of Russell’s ideas, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell, "I couldn’t understand his objection, in fact he was very inarticulate, but I feel in my bones that he must be right."
13. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, "I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!"
14. During the First World War, Ludwig had read Tolstoy’s "The Gospel in Brief", and other writings that extolled the wisdom of peasants. Resolving to lead a simple life, he gave his share of the family money to three of his siblings; since they were very rich already, he believed they could not be corrupted further by receiving his portion.
15. Michael Frayn has spoofed Wittgenstein, e.g.,
706. One might try to provide the man with a mental picture, a working model of his position--as it were a map to enable him to get his bearings. I might say: "You are in a complete mental fog about the whole business." He seizes on this eagerly. He goes through the motions of assenting--nodding his head, pursing his lips, saying: "Yes, yes, that's it exactly. I am in a complete mental fog." Now one asks: "But how do you know it's a mental fog you're in?"
16. Working as a teacher in a village school, Ludwig Wittgenstein hit a girl so hard that she bled behind the ears, and then belaboured a boy about the head until he slumped unconscious to the floor. While Ludwig was dragging the boy's body off to the headmaster, he bumped into the irate father of the girl whose ears had bled, dropped the unconscious boy and ran away. Then he worked as a gardener, and then tried to enlist as a monk, but was dissuaded.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army during the first World War. In 1916 he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several medals for bravery,
18. Ludwig had had a passion and a facility for mechanical things. At the age of ten, he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire; in 1910, he patented an improvement in propeller technology.
19. After exhausting philosophical work Wittgenstein would often relax by watching a western movie, where he preferred to sit at the very front of the cinema, or reading detective stories.
20. He encouraged several of his students,to find work outside of academic philosophy. There are stories, that if any of his philosophy students expressed an interest in pursuing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his classes.
21. Wittgenstein once remarked that he didn't mind at all what he ate, as long as it was always the same thing.
22. "Wittgenstein was an arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic. He was a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy. He could never really decide whether he was a Brahmin or an "untouchable"." - Terry Eagleton
23. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 - 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
24. Final written words: "Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were connected with the noise of the rain."
25. Last words: "Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life." Cancer killed him.
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