GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG QUOTES IV

German scientist & satirist (1742-1799)

There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook C", Aphorisms

Tags: philosophy


Where moderation is a fault indifference is a crime.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg

Tags: apathy


Every man also 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.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook B", The Waste Books


There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook F", Aphorisms


Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


He who understands the wise is wise already.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook E", Aphorisms

Tags: understanding


What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook E", Aphorisms

Tags: truth


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.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook J", Aphorisms

Tags: capital punishment


Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

G. C. LICHTENBERG

attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes

Tags: theory


Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Waste Books

Tags: superstition


One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg

Tags: faults


How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook B", Aphorisms

Tags: morality


What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook G", Aphorisms


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.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook A", Aphorisms

Tags: God


A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook E", Aphorisms

Tags: books


The lowest classes, although they do not think it worth while to write down what they perceive, do nevertheless perceive and feel all that would have been worth the noting. The difference between the masses and the man of learning often consists in no more than a kind of apperception, or in the art of putting things into expression.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Reflections of Lichtenberg


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.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

The Waste Books

Tags: habit