"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing."

"If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it, but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you."

"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about, you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."

"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."

"What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."

"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."

"The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is."

"There can never be surprises in logic."

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

"Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery."

"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."

"The world is the totality of facts, not of things."

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."

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

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

"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."

"Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it."

"Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic."

"The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity."

"If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God."

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."

"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."

"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."

"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

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

"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."

"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

"The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long."

"Language disguises thought."

"Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic."

"Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep."

"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."

"I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe."

"The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."

"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."

"The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)"

"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."

"The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood."

"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."

"An entire mythology is stored within our language."

"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."

"A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion."

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

"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."

"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."

"It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought."

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

"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"

"The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background."

"I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink."