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We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

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
Doe
Spider
Everything
Spiders
Believe
Flies
Things
Catch
Cause
Causes
Science
Order
Spins

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
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Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
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It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
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The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
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The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
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Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence Two times two is four.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Ideas too are a life and a world.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg