Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
F 123
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)
“It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.”
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Henry Kissinger50
United States Secretary of State 1923–2023Related quotes
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
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“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”
C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite
Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist
"On the Physiological Causes of Harmony" (1857), p. 81
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Context: As you are aware, no perceptions obtained by the senses are merely sensations impressed on our nervous systems. A peculiar intellectual activity is required to pass from a nervous sensation to the conception of an external object, which the sensation has aroused. The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicating certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects.
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“The correct lesson to learn from surprises: the world is surprising.”
Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist
“We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)
William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist
Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.
“The past is the past. You cannot change it, but you can learn from it.”
Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist