Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

152. “We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

153. “The 2 timeless drivers that underpin the behavior of every generation: the need to belong and the need to be significant. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

154. “Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

155. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

156. “If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

157. “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? – In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? – Or is the use its life?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

158. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

159. “If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

160. “For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

161. “Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

162. “Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

163. “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

164. “You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

165. “The popular scientific books by our scientists aren’t the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

166. “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

167. “I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

168. “The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

169. “Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn’t find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

170. “Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

171. “A color which would be ‘dirty’ if it were the color of a wall, needn’t be so in a painting.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

172. “How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

173. “Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

174. “Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

175. “Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

176. “Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

177. “Genius is talent exercised with courage.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

178. “Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

179. “Understand or die.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

180. “If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images...”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

181. “All propositions are of equal value.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

182. “What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

183. “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

184. “Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

185. “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

186. “The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

187. “A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

188. “How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

189. “To think that you are not following a rule is to follow a rule.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

190. “It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

191. “Aim at being loved without being admired.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

192. “How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

193. “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

194. “In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

195. “Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

196. “If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely,” it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

197. “The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

198. “Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

199. “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

200. “471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein