Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

• The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Dangerous

• The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Tendency

• 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

• 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 American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Explorer, Discovery

• 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

• Sickness is mankind’s greatest defect.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sickness, Mankind, Defect

• 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

• 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

• Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Weakness

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

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer

• 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

• Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mind, Peace, Opinion

• Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Opinion, Contribution

• Never undertake anything for which you wouldn’t have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Courage, Blessing, Heaven

• Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dreams

• Men still have to be governed by deception.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Men, Deception

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Idea, Nobility

• Man loves company – even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Man, Company

• Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Topics in God

  Tags in Passions

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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