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.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions. ... I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?

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?