I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence
The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
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.
Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.
A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.
At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something – a form – in common with it.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit – not a part of the world.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’; he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’.
It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all…..
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.
It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves
Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn’t rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.
Some people’s taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
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
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.
The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.
It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an “illogical” world would look like.
Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one
Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: “I wish you luck.” I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.
Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
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.
Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn’t find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.
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.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
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.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
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.’
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.