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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.

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.

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.

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."

612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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?