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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

136 quotes

“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Lichtenberg : A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959) by Joseph Peter Stern, p. 84
“Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153
“A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153
“A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 154
“The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to a diagrammatic "Compass of Motives", as quoted in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] (1905) by Sigmund Freud, as translated by James Strachey (1960), …
“So wie wir ein Paar Hosen verwachsen, so verwachsen wir Umgang, Bibliotheken, Grundsätze und dergleichen, zuweilen, ehe sie abgenutzt sind und zuweilen, welches der schlimmste Fall ist, ehe wir neue haben.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gedanken, Satiren, Fragmente (Thoughts, Satires, Fragments), Volume 1 (1907)
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. … To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] (1905) by Sigmund Freud, as translated by James Strachey (1960), p. 100
“There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) said by 1799 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source