Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.
In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. … In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? – If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn’t genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can’t this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
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.
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
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 him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.