612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

(About Jesus) If He did not rise again, then He rotted in the grave like any other human being. He died and his body rotted.

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.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

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

But ordinary language is all right.

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

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

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

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

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.

The world and life are one. (5.621)

I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)

The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy. (6.43)

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. (6.4311)

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

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. (6.51)

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

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

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

We must plow through the whole of language.

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

Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work.

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

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

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.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden.]

Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen.

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.