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.)
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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
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Food, Eating
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Apathy
The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Intelligence, Cunning
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
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: Change, Self-Discovery
Barbaric accuracy – whimpering humility.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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
One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.
—Georg Christoph 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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Little Things, Things, Morals
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: Books, Literature
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
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
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Prophecy
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
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Literature, Thinking, Books, Reading
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Aristocracy
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: Books, Reading
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
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity
Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Liberalism
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers, Science
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage—he won’t encounter many rivals.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
—Georg Christoph 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 Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Identity, Self-Knowledge
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: Jokes, Humor
A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Praise
First we have to believe, and then we believe.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Belief
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
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Topics: Necessity
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