Top 100 Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
#1. With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#2. One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#3. Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#4. The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#5. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#6. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#7. What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#8. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#9. It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#10. Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#11. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#12. How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#13. Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#14. To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#15. God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#17. If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#18. 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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#19. If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#21. What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#22. Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#24. It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#25. Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#26. I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#27. What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#29. It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#30. Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#31. Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#32. I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up ...
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#33. The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#34. If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#35. The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#36. How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#37. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#38. Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#39. I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#40. Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#41. If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#42. The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#43. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#45. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#47. It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#48. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#49. Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#50. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#51. Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#52. Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#53. A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#54. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#55. If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#57. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#58. With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#59. Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#61. To write brashly about some things, it is almost necessary not to know much about them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#62. I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#63. What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#65. He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#66. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#67. The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#68. The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#69. One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#72. How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#73. Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#75. Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#77. If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#78. It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#79. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown ...
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#81. An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#82. A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#83. It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#84. Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#85. The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex; for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#86. It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#87. It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#88. The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#89. Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#91. When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#92. There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#95. I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#96. Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#97. He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#99. A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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