Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - People Quotes

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If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
People don't like to choose lot #1 in a lottery. "Choose it," Reason cries loudly. "It has as good a chance of winning the 12,000 thalers as any other." "In Heaven's name don't choose it," a je ne sais quoi whispers. "There's no example of such little numbers being listed before great winnings." And actually no one takes it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

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
People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg