Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

152. “The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

153. “We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

157. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

160. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

162. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

164. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

167. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

173. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

175. “Genius is talent exercised with courage.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

176. “Understand or die.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

177. “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

178. “All propositions are of equal value.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

183. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

188. “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

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

197. “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

198. “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

199. “Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

200. “One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I.’”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein