Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein's character is with the photographs that exist of his face.

Lately, the one person that's meant a lot to me is Wittgenstein. I think his remarks on color turn into some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read. People call Wittgenstein a philosopher and I call him a poet.

My wife gave him some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he more or less insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed "Hot Ziggety!" — a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim "Hot Ziggety!" when my wife put the bread and cheese before him.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.

Three years after Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was verified by Eddington, ending belief in fixed space and time, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the key figures of our period, published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which cumulatively over the decades tended to destroy confidence in philosophy as a guide to human reason. For half a century Wittgenstein’s influence on academic philosophy was immense. By the early 1990s doubts were raised about his sanity: was he a genius, or simply a madman? But by then much damage had been done. A leading Logical Positivist like Sir A.J. Ayer, who at the time of his death in 1989 was widely regarded as the world’s leading philosopher, remarked with some complacency that philosophy demonstrated that man was ignorant rather than knowledgeable: ‘[It] tends to show that we can’t really know lots of things which we think we know.’ Empirical popular knowledge, usually termed ‘common sense’, had been dismissed contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as ‘the metaphysics of savages’.

He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don't appreciate that.

What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

I can well understand why children love sand.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.