What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.
Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.
This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it-or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.
If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’; he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’.
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?
A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.
The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.
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?
Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world – I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.
What a curious attitude scientists have: “We still don’t know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!”’ As if that went without saying.
There is no such thing as an isolated proposition. For what I call a “proposition” is a position in the game of language.
Waltzing is not the same thing as dancing, since the rhumba is also a dance but it is not a waltz. It therefore follows that one can waltz without dancing the waltz.
The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.
In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.