Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

154. “A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

155. “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

156. “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

157. “How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

163. “Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

164. “The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

167. “It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

168. “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

169. “What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

170. “People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

171. “The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

172. “Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

173. “Human pride is a strange thing; it cannot easily be suppressed, and if you stop up hole A will peep forth again in a twinkling from another hole B, and if this is closed it is ready to come out at hole C, and so on.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

174. “He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

175. “Everyone is a genius at least once a year.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

176. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

177. “Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

178. “If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

179. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

180. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

181. “I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, “Oh, I see. That’s how it must be.” This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

182. “To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

183. “Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

184. “Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

185. “People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

186. “Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

187. “Virtue by premeditation isn’t worth much.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

188. “In the weak, lack of strength to defend oneself passes over into complaining. This can be observed in children when they are mistreated by bigger children; but the best always stay obstinately and defiantly silent.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

189. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

190. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg

191. “A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

192. “With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

193. “The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can’t hear yourself speak.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

194. “There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

195. “A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

196. “The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter’s facility for expression.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

197. “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

198. “Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

199. “Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

200. “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 Christoph Lichtenberg