Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2025 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. “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

106. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

109. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

139. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

141. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

144. “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.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

145. “The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

146. “No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

147. “In every man there is something of all men.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

148. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

149. “Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

150. “Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg