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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.]

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

Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

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.

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

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?"

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)