"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"387. [I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.]"

"378. Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."

"370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it."

"310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all.""

"253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded."

"225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions."

"206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same.""

"144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it."