Ludwig Wittgenstein

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig Wittgenstein

There can never be surprises in logic.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

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

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

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.

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.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.