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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

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Georg C. Lichtenberg
Age: 56 †
Born: 1742
Born: July 1
Died: 1799
Died: February 24
Astronomer
French Moralist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
København
Able
Passings
Human
Greek
Humans
Hardly
Hibernation
Without
Passing
Barbarism
Seem
Greeks
Knowledge
Strengthening
Nature
Attain
Seems
Possessed

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
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Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
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The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, bread-bread-fame or fame-fame-bread.
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If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.
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Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.
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To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
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The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
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What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.
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Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
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As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
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The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
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Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
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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.
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Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
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All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
Georg C. Lichtenberg