Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Philosopher, Physicist)

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) was a German philosopher, physicist, and an important figure in the German Enlightenment. A satirist and writer of aphorisms, he is best known, apart from an experiment in xerographic electricity, for his derision of metaphysical and romantic extravagances.

Born in Ober-Ramstadt, near Darmstadt, State of Hesse, Lichtenberg was crippled by an accident in childhood. He was the 17th child of a Protestant pastor, who trained him in mathematics and the natural sciences. In 1763, Georg entered Göttingen University, where he taught until his death.

Lichtenberg researched geophysics, volcanology, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics. His most important studies were his experimentations into physics. Specifically, he constructed a massive electrophorus in 1777 and discovered the central principle of modern xerographic copying; the images that he reproduced are still termed “Lichtenberg figures.”

A satirist and humorist, Lichtenberg was one of the sharpest intellectuals and prose writers of the eighteenth century. Although Lichtenberg wrote no major creative works, he is well known for his brilliant satire on the Swiss philosopher Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente, appearing under the title Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen (1778.)

Throughout his adult life, Lichtenberg kept notebooks he called Sudelbücher (“waste books.”) In them, he recorded quotations, sketched, and made brief observations on a variety of subjects from science to philosophy. First published posthumously in 1800–06, they became his best-known work and built his repute as an aphorist. Selections from the Sudelbücher were published in English as The Waste Books (2000.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Teachers, Teaching

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one’s own advantage and to that of one’s craft that a large part of genius consists.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Adversity

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Stupidity

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Propaganda, Honesty

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Genius

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Impartiality

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Science, Philosophers, Philosophy

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Originality, Innovation

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Reading, Books

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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Science, Mathematics

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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Art, Books, Literature

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Temptation

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Books, Reading, Literature

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Change

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Humor, Jokes

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.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Accomplishment, Achievement, Success & Failure

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
Topics: Aging, Age

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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Religion, Christians, Christianity

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
Topics: Habits, Habit

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

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.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Freedom

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Talent

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Wisdom

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Theory, Assumptions

First we have to believe, and then we believe.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Belief

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Nature

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Necessity

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Oppression, Soldiers

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