If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.
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.
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.
You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.
Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.
What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...
It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.
The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don’t have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it’s having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, – and if there were, it would be of no value.