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.

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.

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness).

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

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.

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

"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.

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.

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.

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

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?

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

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 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.

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.

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

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.)

Ambition is the death of thought.

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

Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings - shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

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.

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."

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

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

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

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

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?

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