You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

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

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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.

Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that.

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings - shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

Worte sind Taten. Words are deeds.

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] 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.

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...

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

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.

The world and life are one.

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

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

I am my world.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

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

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

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

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

We must plow through the whole of language.

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 just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.