Top 300 Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

152. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

167. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

176. “Genius is talent exercised with courage.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

178. “Understand or die.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

179. “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

180. “All propositions are of equal value.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

189. “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

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

— 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. “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

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. “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

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