All Quotes

"467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.""

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

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

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

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

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

"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?"

"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?"

"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?"

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

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

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

"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?"

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

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Aim at being loved without being admired."

"Our greatest stupidities may be very wise."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense."

"Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree."

"It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.."

"You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth."

"Worte sind Taten."

"If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings."

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."

"The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture."

"The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean."

"A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die."

"The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great."

""Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow."

"You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage."

"If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us."

"I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)"

"Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion."

"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."

"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

"Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness."

"I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around."

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

"One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature."

"You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage."

"If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty."