Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

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Georg C. Lichtenberg

Profession : Scientist

Birth : July 1, 1742

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 C. Lichtenberg

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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 C. Lichtenberg

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 C. Lichtenberg

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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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 C. Lichtenberg

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

Georg C. Lichtenberg