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

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

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

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dar ber mu man schweigen.

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.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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.

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.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

The face is the soul of the body.

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

The world is everything that is the case.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

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

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

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

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic

Music conveys to us itself!

We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.

Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.

Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.

It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.

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

So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

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.

What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

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.

There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.

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