Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

161. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

163. “An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time’s quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

165. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

167. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

169. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

171. “To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

172. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

174. “Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

175. “If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

176. “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

177. “After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

178. “Ideas too are a life and a world.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

179. “Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven’s blessing on your undertaking.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

183. “I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

186. “A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

187. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

189. “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

190. “The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

197. “The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

199. “I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

200. “Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg