Images, sounds and thoughts as orientation factors: Clues with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. – The paper demonstrates how images and sounds become clues both for Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in order to understand sentences and thoughts (I). Nietzsche pursues the question of how we orient ourselves not only through thoughts but also through images and sounds from his philosophical beginnings and, by doing so, he draws horizon lines for answering this question (II). In approximately these leeways, Wittgenstein asks how thinking, instead of simply thinking itself, shows itself: he explores the possibilities of methodically describing this showing itself and finds them in analogizing the understanding of a sentence on the one hand and the understanding of an image and of a piece of music on the other (III).