Quotes by G. C. Lichtenberg with understanding

G. C. Lichtenberg

G. C. Lichtenberg

German writer and physicist

Lived from: 1742 - 1799

Category: Scientists | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagGermany

Born: 1 july 1742 Died: 24 february 1799

  • Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
  • A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
  • The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
  • 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.
  • 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...
  • Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
  • He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
  • If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
  • With the majority of people unbelief in one thing is founded on the blind belief in another.
  • It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
  • Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
  • 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.
  • I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
  • Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
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  • Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
    ― G. C. Lichtenberg
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  • We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
    ― G. C. Lichtenberg
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