Quotes by Lichtenberg, Georg C.

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on adversity   

"Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on affectation
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"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on age and aging   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on age and aging   

"Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was -- nobody any longer wanted to be that."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on disciples   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on discovery
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"If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on dishonesty   

"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?"

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on experience   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on faces   

"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on fallibility
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"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on fantasy   

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on fashion
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"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on flattery   

"If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on food and eating   

"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?"

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on food and eating   

"A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on fools and foolishness   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on free will   

"What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on freedom   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on genius   

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on genius   

"Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on achievement
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"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on greatness   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on habit   

"Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on heaven   

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on nature   

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on humankind   

"If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on ideals and idealism   

"Ideas too are a life and a world."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on ideas   

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on identity   

"To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on imitation   

"Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on art   

"Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on indifference   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on intentions   

"If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on jokes and jokers   

"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."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on journalism and journalists   

"Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on learning   

"Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on liberals
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"It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on libraries   

"If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on angels
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"If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on apathy
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