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
Every man 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
Topics: Morals, Morality
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Literature, Books
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Apathy
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Belief
Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Education, Teaching, Teachers
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Fantasy
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Wisdom
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
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Learning
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Imitation
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Discovery
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Identity
One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything; one’s last is to come to terms with everything.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Wisdom, Acceptance
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Contentment
God creates the animals, man creates himself.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Purpose, Intentions
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Discovery
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Virtue
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Science
Judge men not by their opinions but by what their opinions have made of them.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Opinions
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Self-Discovery, Change
Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Liberalism
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Faces, Face
It is a golden rule that one should never judge men by their opinions, but rather by what their opinions make of them.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Opinions
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Character, Jokes
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: People
Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Impartiality
He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Wisdom
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Science
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage—he won’t encounter many rivals.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Religion, Angels
It often takes more courage to change one’s opinion than to stick to it.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Change, Opinion
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
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 exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Prophecy
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
Topics: Evangelism, Preaching
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
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
Ideas too are a life and a world.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Ideas
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Mistakes
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Werner Heisenberg German Theoretical Physicist
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing German Writer
Luther Burbank American Botanist
George Washington Carver American Scientist
Paul Vixie American Scientist
Eliezer Yudkowsky American Scientist
Arthur Schopenhauer German Philosopher
Max Planck German Theoretical Physicist
Friedrich Nietzsche German Philosopher, Scholar
Carl Zuckmayer German Playwright