Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

2. “It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

3. “Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

4. “In each of us there is a little of all of us.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

5. “We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

6. “God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

7. “The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

8. “One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

9. “In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

10. “Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

11. “It often takes more courage to change one’s opinion than to stick to it.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

12. “Don’t judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

13. “Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

14. “Reading means borrowing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

15. “One has to do something new in order to see something new.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

16. “The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

17. “What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

18. “Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

19. “You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

20. “I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

21. “If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

22. “It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

23. “Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

24. “The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

25. “The most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

26. “Delicacy in woman is strength.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

27. “He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

28. “When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

29. “A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

30. “Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

31. “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

32. “Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

33. “Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

34. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

35. “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

36. “Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

37. “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

38. “Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

39. “A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

40. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

41. “The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

42. “Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

43. “Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

44. “The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

45. “I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

46. “Too much is unwholesome.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

47. “Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

48. “I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

49. “He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

50. “A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg