Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede – not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can’t count above 14.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

53. “A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

54. “Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence “Two times two is four.””

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

55. “It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn’t think of them ourselves.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

56. “Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

57. “Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

58. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

59. “We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

60. “One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

61. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

62. “The “second sight” possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don’t wear trousers.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

63. “A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

64. “Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

65. “To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

66. “There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

67. “Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

68. “The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

69. “The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

70. “Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

71. “Those who never have time do least.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

72. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

73. “I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

74. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

75. “In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don’t call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

76. “He who understands the wise is wise already.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

77. “Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience – if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

78. “The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

79. “Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

80. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

81. “To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one’s debts.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

82. “There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

83. “The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

84. “The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

85. “God, who winds up our sundials...”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

86. “A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

87. “The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

88. “The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

89. “One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

90. “Nothing reveals a man’s character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

91. “As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

92. “If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

93. “What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn’t like to read something new?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

94. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

95. “A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

96. “One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

97. “Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

98. “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

99. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

100. “Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg