With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.

My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.

I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

We are struggling with language. / We are engaged in a struggle with language.

Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.

What would it feel like not to have heard of Christ? / Should we feel left alone in the dark? / Do we escape such a feeling simply in the way a child escapes it when he knows there is someone in the room with him.

Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

Working in philosophy […] is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)

The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. […] Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumpled. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.

A confession has to be a part of your new life. 

I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express. Actually not as much as that, but by no more than a tenth. That is still worth something. Often my writing is nothing by 'stuttering'.

I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. […]

Incidentally, when I was in Norway during the year 1913-14 I had some thoughts of my own, or so at least it seems to me now. I mean I have the impression that at the time I brought to life new movements in thinking (but perhaps I am mistaken). Whereas now I seem just to apply old ones.

The delight I take in my thoughts is a delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living?

Don't play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do.

If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed.

The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.

The horrors of hell can be experienced within a single day; that's plenty of time.

The light work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light.

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. […]

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

I find it important in philosophising to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. […]

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.

You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.

In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.

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.

No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak it; – but not because he is not yet clever enough. / The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in falsehood and reaches out from falsehood towards truth on just one occasion.

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

Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e. though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. / One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil. […]

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. […]

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level., so that they immediately decline as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. […]

One might say: 'Genius is talent exercised with courage'.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning, – then it can be put back into circulation.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

You must say something new and yet it must all be old. / In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things – and all the same it must be something new. […]

As we get old, problems slip from our fingers again, as they used to when we were young. It isn't just that we can't crack them, we cannot even keep hold of them.

Don't demand too much, and don't be afraid that what you demand justly will melt into nothing.

Philosophers use a language that is already deformed as though by shoes that are too tight.

You can't build clouds. And that's why the future you dream of never comes true.

Virtually in the same way as there is a difference between deep and shallow sleep, there are thoughts which occur deep down and thoughts which bustle about on the surface.

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 it.

Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophises yearns for.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

My account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it.

some notes of Wittgenstein from Culture and Value