Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? - Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs.

Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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

What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions. ... I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?

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

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

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

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

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

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6) Variant translations: The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?