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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

158. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

160. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

167. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

169. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

171. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

173. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

178. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

188. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

191. “To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg