Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes (137 quotes)

A 38
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook A (1765-1770)
Context: 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.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 49
Variant translations of first portion: A book is a mirror: If an ape peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. — this has actually been the most commonly cited form, but it is based on either a loose non-literal translation or a mistranslation of the German original: Ein Buch ist Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)
Context: 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.

Books

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Bei den meisten Menschen gründet sich der unglaube in einer Sache auf blinden Glauben in einer anderen.
http://books.google.com/books?id=oK1LAAAAcAAJ&q=%22Bei+den+meisten+Menschen+gr%C3%BCndet+sich+der+unglaube+in+einer+Sache+auf+blinden+Glauben+in+einer+anderen%22&pg=PA104#v=onepage
L 81
Variant translation: With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

Men , Spring

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

“All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As quoted in Lichtenberg : A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959) by Joseph Peter Stern, p. 84
Context: 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.

Law , Beauty , Mathematics , Nature

“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

Feeling , Learning

“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”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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), p. 101; also quoted by Freud in an open letter to Albert Einstein, Why War? (1933).
Variant translation: 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, "food-food-fame" or "fame-fame-food".
Context: 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."

Motivation

“We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance;”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

B 11
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)
Context: 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.

Soul

“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.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

B 33
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)
Context: 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.

Universe

“Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 65
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)
Context: A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things... The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

Understanding , Nature , Sense , Memory

“Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 49
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

God , Animals

“It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

G 4
Variant translations:
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard.
It is virtually impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd, without singeing someone's beard
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Truth , Singing

“It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A 26
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook A (1765-1770)
Context: 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.

“There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 59
Variant translation: There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible...
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)
Context: There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. … It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth … into a liar — that I call an achievement.

People

“A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153

Books , World

“A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 19
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

“Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

H 36
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

Light

“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

B 37 "Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act."
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Nature

“Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 65
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Lie , Books , Light , Reading

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 70
Variant translation: The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

Light , Flying

“The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

H 7
Variant translation: The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

Truth

“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

B 12
Variant translation: Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.
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
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

“With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 76
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 72
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

Science

“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

A 10
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook A (1765-1770)

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153

Science

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

G 32
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Understanding

“It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 157
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

Children , Truth , Fools , Feeling

“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

D 20
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

H 10
Variant translation: He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage — he won't encounter many rivals.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

“Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 78
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“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

F 44
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Nature , Knowledge

“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

G 30
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Animals

“One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 85
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

People , Way , Behavior

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

D 5
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“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

F 82
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Water

“Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 39
Variant translation: Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“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

B 52
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

World , Thinking

“Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

L24
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

Search , Motivation

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

H 4
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

Age , Understanding

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

D 96
Variant translation: To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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.
Gedanken, Satiren, Fragmente (Thoughts, Satires, Fragments), Volume 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=azM4AQAAIAAJ&q=%22So+wie+wir+ein+Paar%22+%22Hosen+verwachsen+so+verwachsen+wir+Umgang+Bibliotheken+Grunds%C3%A4tze+und+dergleichen+zuweilen+ehe+sie+abgenutzt+sind+und+zuweilen+welches+der+schlimmste+Fall+ist+ehe+wir+neue+haben%22&pg=PA14#v=onepage (1907)

Time

“What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

G 7
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Nature , Knowledge

“Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

L 44
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

Law

“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

J 115
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

Drawing , Perfection

“A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 154

Parting

“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

D 62
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Idea , Reading

“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

D 89
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Knowledge , Reading

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 33
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Country

“Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

L 34
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

“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

F 73
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Lying

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 88
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Dreams

“If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

C 54
Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)

Hunger , People

“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

B 49
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Way , Feeling , Courage , Question

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