25 Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg


We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on age

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on age

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 C. Lichtenberg on alone

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 C. Lichtenberg on change

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

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on dreams

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 on experience

God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on god

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 C. Lichtenberg on imagination

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on intelligence

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

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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on knowledge

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on men

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on men

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 C. Lichtenberg on nature

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

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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg on 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 on nature

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

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