Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.”

“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.”

“If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”

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

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

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

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”

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

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”

“Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'.... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.”

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”

“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.”

“That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.”

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”

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

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

“What can be shown, cannot be said.”

“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.”

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

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

“I am my world.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

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

“Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”

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

“Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.”