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."

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

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

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

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.

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

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

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

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

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

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

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

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?

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man-but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

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 it.

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.

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

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Worte sind Taten. Words are deeds.

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.

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

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

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

A confession has to be part of your new life.

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

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?

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

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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

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.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

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

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?"

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

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

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

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

Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

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

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

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

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.