110+ Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes On Education, Religion And Art

Georg C. Lichtenberg was a German scientist and satirist who lived in the 18th century. He was a professor of physics at the University of Göttingen and is best known for his aphorisms and commentaries on the Enlightenment. He was also a pioneer in the study of electricity and was among the first to recognize the importance of the conservation of energy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg on education, life, religion.

Top 10 Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

1. The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
2. Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
3. Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
4. If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.
5. Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
6. To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.
7. Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.
8. It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
9. 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.
10. One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Georg C. Lichtenberg Short Quotes

• Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
• If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.
• Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
• Delicacy in woman is strength.
• Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
• People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.
• Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
• There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.
• Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
• Men still have to be governed by deception.

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Education

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Life

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Ideas too are a life and a world. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The fear of death which is imprinted in men is at the same time a great expedient Heaven employs to hinder them from many misdeeds: many things are left undone for fear of imperiling one's life or health. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Religion

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 C. Lichtenberg

Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Art

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About World

A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 events are not produced, they happen. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Love

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes About Nature

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 you will, even a man, only no longer make me me. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 C. Lichtenberg

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georg C. Lichtenberg Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 C. Lichtenberg

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

One has to do something new in order to see something new. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. 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 C. Lichtenberg

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were. — Georg C. 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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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, before it has done so itself. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... 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. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 C. Lichtenberg

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread." — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Life Lessons by Georg C. Lichtenberg

1. Georg C. Lichtenberg believed that it was important to never stop learning, and that knowledge was the key to unlocking a more fulfilling life.
2. He also taught that it was important to be open to new ideas and to be willing to challenge your own beliefs.
3. He also emphasized the importance of being able to think critically and to question the status quo in order to make progress.