Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes - page 5

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)
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Ideas too are a life and a world. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new? View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want? View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg