"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved."

"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."

"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."

"If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done."

"Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of 'pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism."

"The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated."

"It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him."

"For a truly religious man nothing is tragic."

"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."

"Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe."

"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'."

"If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from outside! The honorable thing to do is put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest."

"Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."

"Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental."

"The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness."

"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."

"A picture is a fact."

"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."

"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all."

"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks."

"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 him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

"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."

"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."

"For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules."

"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."

"It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise."

"Belief in the causal nexus is superstition."

"In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair, disposing of it by means of another question is not."

"I am my world."

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

"It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all....."

"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."

"Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it."

"The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are."

"Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus."

"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 is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves."

"Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us."

"What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural."

"One age misunderstands another, and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way."

"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."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

"Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized."

"Music conveys to us itself!"

"The limits of your language are the limits of your world."

"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical."

"But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing."

"Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it."

"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."