Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. … To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. … It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth … into a liar — that I call an achievement.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg