"I never believed in God before." - that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness).

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

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

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? - It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

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 I was deluded.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Ambition is the death of thought.

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?"

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.

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.

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

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.