Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “In every man there is something of all men.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

153. “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

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. “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

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

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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

165. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

172. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

174. “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

175. “Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

176. “Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

177. “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

178. “Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

183. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

186. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

188. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

190. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

193. “First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again – and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

194. “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

195. “The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

196. “It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can’t do anything from early habit.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

198. “People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

200. “The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg