Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

204. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

210. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

213. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

222. “Barbaric accuracy – whimpering humility.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

223. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

229. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

231. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

234. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

241. “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

242. “I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

243. “If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

244. “It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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