"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht."

"Our greatest stupidities may be very wise."

"Aim at being loved without being admired."

"Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent.”"

"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."

"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."

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

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."

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

"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?"

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

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

"A confession has to be part of your new life."

"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?"

"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?"

"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?"

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

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

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

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

"612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion."

"The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)"

"What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)"

"The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)"

"The world is all that is the case. (1)"

"The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

"The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense."

"Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem."

"It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all."

"What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about."

"It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world."

"The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one."

"There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."

"To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning."

"What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life."

"Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God."

"One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches."

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

"It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him."

"I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts. ——"

"My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression."

"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one."

"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

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