LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

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

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

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

The world is independent of my will.

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.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

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.

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

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

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.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.