Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

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

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

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
I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

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
In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We are ourselves the measure of the miraculous; if we should find a universal measure, the miraculous elements would disappear, and all things would be of equal size.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.

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
To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg