Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

203. “Barbaric accuracy – whimpering humility.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

213. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

217. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

219. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

221. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

224. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

229. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

232. “The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

233. “Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

239. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

242. “Kenntnis der Mittel ohne eine eigentliche Anwendung, ja ohne Gabe und Willen, sie anzuwenden, ist, was man jetzt gemeiniglich Gelehrsamkeit nennt.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

243. “As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown...”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

244. “If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

245. “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

246. “It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

247. “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

248. “A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

249. “To write brashly about some things, it is almost necessary not to know much about them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

250. “Ambition and suspicion always go together.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg