Here's a new one: a mother says to her child, 'He looks like a sherpa, doesn't he?'.

'And the question to be asked is not: What is my opinion of all this? That question is easily answered, but those who ask only that have fallen into the trap, for it is precisely the greatest error of our intellectual life to assume that the most effective way of dealing with any phenomenon is to have an opinion about it. The real question is: What is my relation to all this?'

'I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.'

'...a slave is a tool with a soul, while a tool is a slave without a soul.'

'Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.'

'…they wanna know if I claim the clique that I'm hangin with…'

2011 Pazz & Jop ballot (archived at furia.com)

'…the genuine philosophers who haunt our cities—by contrast to the fake ones—take on all sorts of different appearances just because of other people’s ignorance…'

'… the experience of reading texts which harbour such a philosophical ideal will itself be subject to the same fears and fantasies—a fear of all but inevitable expressiveness, a fantasy of all but impossible community, and a sense that there is nothing of oneself that is not given expression, and put at stake, in Wittgenstein's words, and hence in the burden of bearing their meaning even when one comes to feel that no one else could understand what they mean—either to Wittgenstein, or to this reader of Wittgenstein, the one who is at once still within the circle and aiming to inscribe a new circle outside it, through acts of reading so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention, but with the hope of their becoming the source of new conventions.'