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. To repeat: don't think, but look!

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?"

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

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

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

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

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

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

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

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

1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

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

"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.

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

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

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

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

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

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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.

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

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."

When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.

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

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.

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

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

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

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?

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?

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

A confession has to be part of your new life.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

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

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?

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

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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

Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

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

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

206. 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."

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

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

310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

370. 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.

378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

387. [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.]

467. 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."