Top 300 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

256. “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

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

263. “Ambition and suspicion always go together.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

264. “If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

265. “Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

266. “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

267. “Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

268. “The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

269. “All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

270. “How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

271. “Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

272. “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

273. “I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up...”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

275. “Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

276. “The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

277. “A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

278. “No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

279. “With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

280. “With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

281. “I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

282. “What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

283. “Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

284. “A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

285. “There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

286. “If it were true what in the end would be gained Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

287. “There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don’t understand them; sold by people who don’t understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don’t understand them; and now even written by people who don’t understand them.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

289. “He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

290. “The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

291. “There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in – the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

292. “As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

293. “Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

294. “Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

295. “If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

296. “Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

297. “The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

298. “If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

299. “It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

300. “Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg