Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery."

"The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language."

"Don't think, but look! (PI 66)"

"There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads."

"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all."

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

"The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves."

"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."

"Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."

"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved."

"I am my world."

"An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."

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

"The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves."

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

"How small a thought it takes to fill a life."

"If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God."

"An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."

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

"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all."