Quotes by G. C. Lichtenberg

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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  • Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
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  • He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
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  • A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
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  • 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.
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  • Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
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  • 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.
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  • Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.
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  • There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
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  • A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
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  • A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
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  • A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
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  • A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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  • A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.
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  • A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
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  • A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
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  • 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.
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  • Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
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What are the most famous quotes from G. C. Lichtenberg?

The two most famous quotes from G. C. Lichtenberg are:

  • "Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together."
  • "He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way."

When did G. C. Lichtenberg live?

G. C. Lichtenberg was born in 1742 and died in the year 1799.