Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on Wise Famous Quotes.

If we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

{Said in a letter to Voltaire}

I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.

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

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".

Everything that matters in life flows through tubes.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

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

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression ... So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.

Is our conception of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

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.

It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

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

When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

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

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

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