Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mechanical, Instincts, Prejudices

• There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Transcendental, Ventriloquism

• There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Progress

  Tags in Science

• Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and times – and this is the worst of all – before we have new ones.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ourselves, Acquaintance, Libraries

• To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Ourselves, Thoughtful

• The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Knowledge

  Tags in Human Nature

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Moral, Friction, Habit

• To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Applause

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Noblest, Creature

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Instrument, Feel, Judge

• To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Animals, Seldom

• We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Self, Observing

• The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Explorer, Discovery

• The fly that doesn’t want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Secure, Fly

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Superiority, Sign

• Sickness is mankind’s greatest defect.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sickness, Mankind, Defect

• To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Imitation, Forms

• Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Growing

• I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Believe In Yourself

• He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Earnest, Flattery

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (95)

Birth:	1st July, 1742
Death:	24th February, 1799
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Satirist, Scientist

About

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.

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