Quote

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.

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
Character
Skeletons
Trying
Alter
Every
Purposes
Something
Sheep
Men
Training
Like
Broken
Purpose
Draught
Cannot
Skeleton

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Image
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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
Image
A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Ambition and suspicion always go together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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
Image
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
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
Image
After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Image
Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence Two times two is four.
Georg C. Lichtenberg