Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Biography : German physicist, satirist and Anglophile.
Born: 1742 - Died: 1799
Period:
18th century
Place of birth: Germany
Germany

Germany

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Quotes

He who truly knows himself can soon come to know everyone else. Everything is reflection.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

What good is all sunrise, if we do not stand up?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

sun

What good is all sunrise, if we do not stand up?

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence “Two times two is four.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

doubt

Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

Man

My body is that part of the world which my thoughts can change. Even imaginary illnesses can become real ones. In the rest of the world, my hypotheses cannot change the order of things.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

We all err, but everybody errs differently.
A phrase often attributed to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Quotation of uncertain origin /

mistake

He could refract an idea which everyone thought simple into seven others, as the prism does with sunlight, each finer than the other, then gather together a host of others to recreate the white light of the sun, where others merely saw disorder and confusion.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

Pride, a magnanimous passion, is not blind to personal failings, but arrogance is so.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

How happy many people would be if they cared about other people's affairs as little as about their own.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

Is it not peculiar that a literal translation is almost always a terrible one? And yet, anything can be translated well. One sees here what it really means to understand fully a language; it means to understand fully the people who speak it.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

There are people that can believe everything they want. These are happy creatures.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

Do not have too artificial an idea of man but judge him naturally. Don't consider him too good or too bad.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything: and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

wisdom

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

to think

Nothing cheers me up more than when I have grasped something difficult, and yet I rarely try to understand such difficult things. I should try to do it more often.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

There is something in every person's character that cannot be broken — the bony structure of his character.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

character

The people who never have time are the ones who get the least done.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

time

How close may our thoughts come at times to grazing on a great discovery?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

thought

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

It is a pity that one cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what they have eaten.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

Among the greatest discoveries that the human mind has made in recent times belongs the art of judging books without having read them.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

But, what good is all of this light when people either have no eyes or deliberately shut those they have?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

I have invariably found that, all else failing, a man's character can be deduced from nothing so surely as from a jest that he takes in bad part.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Sudelbücher /

character