We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. 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.

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

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

But ordinary language is all right.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

We must plow through the whole of language.

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.