Quote

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Ideas
Life
World

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Image
The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Everyone is a genius at least once a year.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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
Image
There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points born and died farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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
Image
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg