The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
The world is independent of my will.
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . .
My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?
Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
Ethics and aesthetics are one.
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.
The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.
I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."
How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.
And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
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