A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

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.

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

Ambition is the death of thought.

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

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 life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

"I never believed in God before." - that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? - It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

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.

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

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

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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.

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? - Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

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.

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.

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

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

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

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.

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

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

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

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

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 a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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."

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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

What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

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

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."

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?

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

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

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.