Wittgenstein, the man and the philosopher, is a Promethean, puzzling mind. Both his personality and his philosophizing, as Ray Monk superbly recounts in his introduction, emerged from a highly peculiar way of systematizing self-examination. This diary exemplifies that splendidly in a crucial phase of his later development.

Allan Janik, co-founder, Vienna's Wittgenstein Initiative

These diaries—brilliant and tortured—offer profound insight into the private world of the anti-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the deepest and most self-critical philosophical thinker of the twentieth century. Utterly fascinating—as well as indispensable for anyone interested in the man, his thought, or the intimate connections between the two.

Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University, author of The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind

What would it look like to truly face yourself? To give a ruthless self-accounting, to set to dismantling what’s unworthy, and to work doggedly towards remolding whatever remains? In this profound and intimate diary Wittgenstein gives us a glimpse—and it’s both inspiring and terrifying. It embodies a demand that we change our lives.

Gabriel Citron, Department of Religion, Princeton University