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Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
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
Would
Exercise
Knowledge
Point
Warns
Pain
Exert
Reason
Limbs
Need
Breaking
Needs
Recognize
Much
Mere
More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
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
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
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory and when I arrived I was tired.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
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
