Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

102. “Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

103. “The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

105. “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

106. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

107. “The fly that doesn’t want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

108. “Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

109. “You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

110. “The fear of death which is imprinted in men is at the same time a great expedient Heaven employs to hinder them from many misdeeds: many things are left undone for fear of imperiling one’s life or health.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

111. “There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

112. “Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

113. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

114. “One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

115. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

116. “There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

117. “What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

118. “Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

119. “Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

120. “Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

121. “One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

122. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

123. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

124. “With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

125. “A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

126. “What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

127. “A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

128. “Sickness is mankind’s greatest defect.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

129. “Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

130. “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

131. “Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

132. “Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

133. “Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

134. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

135. “I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done ‘for the Fatherland’.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

136. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

137. “Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

138. “It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

139. “If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

140. “Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

141. “Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

142. “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

143. “I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

144. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

145. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

146. “Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

147. “The great rule: 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

148. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

149. “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

150. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg