A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
The face is the soul of the body.
Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
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.
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
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.
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
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.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
A confession has to be part of your new life.
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.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
The world is independent of my will.
A picture is a fact.
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
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.
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.'
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.
You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
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.
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
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.
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
