Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes - Page 5

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

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.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

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.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

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.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

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.

Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

God: personified incomprehensibility.

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.

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.

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

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

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.

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

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.

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.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.