Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

203. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

214. “The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

219. “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

220. “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

221. “As nations improve, so do their gods.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

222. “They do not think, therefore they are not.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

223. “Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

224. “Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

225. “Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

226. “Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

227. “Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

228. “It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

229. “We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

230. “To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

231. “Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

232. “Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

233. “Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

234. “Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit – nay, than they think.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

235. “How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people’s business as about their own.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

236. “We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

237. “Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

238. “Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

239. “Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

240. “What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

241. “How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

242. “So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

243. “There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

244. “Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

245. “There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

246. “When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

247. “Ambition and suspicion always go together.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

248. “Barbaric accuracy – whimpering humility.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

249. “One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

250. “The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg