"The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful."

"Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it."

"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."

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

"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."

"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. To repeat: don't think, but look!"

"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 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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work."

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

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

"This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot."

"Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?""

"The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway."

"People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in."

"Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels."

"Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it."

"The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water."

"Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen."

"What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden.]"

"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."

"We must plow through the whole of language."

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

"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."

"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."

"Every explanation is after all an hypothesis."

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

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

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

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

"But ordinary language is all right."

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

"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."

"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."

"Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

"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."

"A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in..."

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)"