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.

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.

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

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

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.

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.