"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."

"It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German."

""It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given."

"I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same."

"You won't — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one."

"Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist ... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written."

"[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people."

"The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them to scientific findings, is called naturalism. Many philosophers since Plato have scorned naturalism, arguing that science cannot provide answers to the deepest philosophical questions, especially ones that concern not just how the world is but how it ought to be. They think that philosophy should reach conclusions that are true a priori, which means that they are prior to sensory experiences and can be gained by reason alone. Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to find any undisputed a priori truths. The absence of generally accepted a priori principles shows that the distinguished Platonic philosophical tradition of looking for them has failed. Wisdom must be sought more modestly. Sometimes, however, philosophy gets too modest. The highly influential Austrian/British philosopher Wittgenstein asserted that philosophy is unlike science in that all it should aim for is conceptual clarification. In his early writings, he looked to formal logic to provide the appropriate tools, and in his later work he emphasized attention to ordinary language. He claimed that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.” Much of twentieth-century philosophy in English devoted itself to the modest goal of merely clarifying existing concepts. But no one has learned much from analyzing the logic or the ordinary use of the words “wise” and “wisdom.” We need a theory of wisdom that can tell us what is important and why it is important. Such theorizing requires introducing new concepts and rejecting or modifying old ones."

"Wittgenstein was basically unscientific. He knew that science was partly driven by a desire to generalize, and he rejected generalization. Scientific questions were of no great interest to him; they merely addressed the working of the natural world. Wittgenstein spent much of his later life examining the way in which language may shape our reality. This is not a subject that is irrelevant to science."

"The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. [...] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided."

"As far as I know, Whitehead never read Wittgenstein. He told me, however, of an encounter with Wittgenstein which was entirely characteristic of the man and may interest you. The Whiteheads, at my suggestion, invited Wittgenstein for a social tea. Wittgenstein came and, as was his wont, began to silently pace back and forth across the room. Finally, he declared, "A proposition has two poles; they are apb." Naturally enough. Whitehead enquired, "What are a and b?" "They," replied Wittgenstein with some solemnity, "are indefinable.""