Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

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

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
To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

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
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There is a great deal of difference between still believing something, and again believing it.

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
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg