Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Ambition is the death of thought.

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

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.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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.

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

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."

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

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

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.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

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.

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.