In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another...

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not...

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves

Don’t think, but look! (PI 66)

It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an “illogical” world would look like.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that...

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – that does not occur to them.

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn’t rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as...

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk...

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.

But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions...

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’; he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’.

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at...

Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must...

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when...

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity;...

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure...

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit – not a part of the world.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Music conveys to us itself!

For remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict rules– it hasn’t been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare...

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something – a form – in common with it.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots;...

Some people’s taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak...

6.4311Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie...

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you...