To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs.

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.

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

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

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.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man-but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Worte sind Taten. Words are deeds.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

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.

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."

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

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.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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.

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."

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.

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

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?

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

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

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

The world is all that is the case.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

The thought is the significant proposition.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6) Variant translations: The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

The world and life are one.