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.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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.

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?"

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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.

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.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

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

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

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

I am my world.

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

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

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.

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

We must plow through the whole of language.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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

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.

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

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

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.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

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.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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.

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

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

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

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

The thought is the significant proposition.

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.

My difficulty is only an - enormous - difficulty of expression.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

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.

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?"