192 quotes
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Culture and Value (1980)
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Culture and Value (1980)
Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Culture and Value (1980)
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean.
Culture and Value (1980)
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Culture and Value (1980)
Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.
On Certainty (1969)
If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.
On Certainty (1969)
My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.
The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
The Blue Book (1931)
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
Culture and Value (1980)
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
On Certainty (1969)
Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
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.
Personal Recollections (1981)
People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last.
Culture and Value (1980)