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

✵ 1. July 1742 – 24. February 1799
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: 137   quotes 3   likes

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

“A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 10
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

Education

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

D 66
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Books

“It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F154
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Effort , Learning , Indifference

“Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 100
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“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

D 58
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 21
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

God , Passion

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 27
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“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

E 52
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Books , Feeling

“One has to do something new in order to see something new.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 1770
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

“Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 144
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Learning , Reading

“What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 123
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Drawing

“What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 92
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

“The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

G 42
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

“A on his lips and not-A in his heart.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 95
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Heart

“First we have to believe, and then we believe.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 55
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

C 33
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)

Truth , Age

“If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

L 23
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook L (1793-1796)

“It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 48
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

Life , Parting

“Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 69
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Law

“Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

E 32
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Courage

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 47
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“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

B 30
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Peace , Passion