Top 100 Georg Lichtenberg Quotes
#1. To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#2. How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#3. Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#5. With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#6. There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#10. The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#11. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#14. Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#15. The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#16. 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
#17. A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#19. Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#20. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#21. What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#22. There are two ways of extending life : firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another ... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#24. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#25. 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
#26. Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#27. It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#29. To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#31. 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
#33. To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#34. I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#35. A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#36. 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
#38. Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#39. How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#40. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#41. 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
#43. Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#44. The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#45. 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
#46. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#47. God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#48. It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#51. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#52. Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#53. Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#54. The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#56. 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
#57. He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#58. A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#59. 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
#60. The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#61. 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
#62. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#63. Many intelligent people, when about to write ... , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#64. With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#66. 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
#67. Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#68. Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#69. One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#70. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#72. 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
#73. To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#74. 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
#75. Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#76. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#79. 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 C. Lichtenberg
#80. Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#81. Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#82. Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#83. I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#84. Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#85. What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#87. It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#88. If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#89. I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#93. One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#94. Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#95. 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
#96. Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#97. Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#98. In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#100. Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?
Georg C. Lichtenberg