Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Nature Quotes

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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
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

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

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
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
The way to determine the secret workings of Nature is from analogous cases where one has caught her in act.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg