Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

236 quotes in 2439 categories

• To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that…
• 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…
• What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
• Ambition and suspicion always go together.
• There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade,…
• 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…
• 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...
• 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…
• If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.
• 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…
• Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
• The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.
• 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…
• Ideas too are a life and a world.
• It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
• If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve
• Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.
• The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest…
• The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
• 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…

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