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

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.

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.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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."

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?

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.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push 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.

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

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.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

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?

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.