Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

207. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

209. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

212. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

214. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

220. “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

221. “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

222. “Barbaric accuracy – whimpering humility.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

223. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

225. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

232. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

235. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

238. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

242. “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

243. “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

244. “The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

245. “It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

246. “One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

248. “Ambition and suspicion always go together.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

249. “The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself – on which is founded the entire integral calculus – is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

250. “Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg