Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

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.

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

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 has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

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 …

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.