Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “A picture is a model of reality.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

152. “You can’t think decently if you’re not willing to hurt yourself.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

153. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

157. “There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

158. “A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

159. “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

160. “Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

161. “Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

162. “If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

163. “You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

164. “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

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

168. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

173. “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.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

176. “Genius is talent exercised with courage.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

177. “Understand or die.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

178. “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

179. “All propositions are of equal value.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

184. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

189. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

191. “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

192. “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

194. “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

195. “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

196. “One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

197. “No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

198. “If you already have a person’s love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.”

— 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. “Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein