Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

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

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

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

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.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Ludwig von Beethoven had never mastered the elements of arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction. A thirteen-year-old boy whom he had befriended tried unsuccessfully to teach him simple multiplication and division.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

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

Boston, n.: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

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

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently -- and tolerantly -- to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

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.

Our civilization is characterized by the word ''progress.'' Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only

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

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

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

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

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.

For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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.

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.

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.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

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.

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

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.

In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

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

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.''

A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.