Lichtenberg Quotes

Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

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.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. —G. C. Lichtenberg

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility? {Said in a letter to Voltaire}

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

Reading means borrowing. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

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

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel wenn ein Affe hineinsieht so kann kein Apostel heraus gucken.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.

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.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

Everything that matters in life flows through tubes.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate

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.

Imaginas que yo persigo lo extraño por ignorancia de lo bello, pero no es así, ocurre que porque tu ignoras lo bello, yo busco lo extraño.

...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Aujourd'hui, on cherche partout à répandre le savoir; qui sait si, dans quelques siècles, il n'y aura pas des universités pour rétablir l'ancienne ignorance?

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written

Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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.

In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do." So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how.

No es que los oráculos hayan dejado de hablar, sino que los hombres han dejado de escucharlos.

I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.

When has the majority ever been right? Sure they’re convinced—because they don’t think things through. Humanity has survived a lot of dooms.

He who is enamoured of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

To make yourself something less than you can be - that too is a form of suicide.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid.   He who understands the wise is wise already.

Is our conception of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

For the loss of those we have loved there is no alleviation but time and carefully and rationally chosen diversions such as will not cause our heart to reproach us.

Книгата е огледало. И ако в него се огледа маймуна, то от него не може да погледне лик на апостол.

Когато една книга ти се харесва все повече с течение на годините, това е верен признак, че тя е добра.

We can never get to the Promised Land, for if we did, it would not longer be the Promised Land.

The most brightly colored birds sing the worst; the same goes for people.

Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown.

I believe that some of the greatest minds that ever lived had not read half as much and did not know nearly as much as some of our mediocre scholars. And some 20 of our verr mediocre scholars could have become greater men if they had not read so much.

Rochefoucauld spunea că dragostea poate fi comparată cu o fantomă, deoarece este ceva despre care toţi vorbim, dar niciodată n-am văzut-o, iar Lichtenberg, în eseul său Uber die Macht der Liebe, contestă şi respinge realitatea şi naturaleţea ei; însă amândoi greşesc. Pentru că dacă ar fi ceva aflat în contradicţie şi exterioară naturii umane - cu alte cuvinte, dacă ar fi doar o parodie imaginară, nu ar fi fost zugrăvită cu atâta entuziasm de poeţii tuturor timpurilor, sau nu ar fi fost acceptată de omenire cu o pasiune atât de statornică; pentru că nimic din tot ceea ce reprezintă frumosul şi aparţine artei nu poate exista fără adevăr.

If there was a God he reasoned it would have the same relation to us as we have to blades of grass. Do we make them grow? Yes in the sense that we water the lawn. Do we care for them and worry over them? Again as a lawn but not as individual blades. We don't give them names. We just want them to look nice and green. A God who created the earth would want it to look nice an blue from space. He would sit back after a long day of creating things and think to himself now that's what a planet should look like.

Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buch?

Има хора, които си въобразяват, че всичко, което се прави със сериозен вид, е разумно.

Най-опасната лъжа е леко изпопачената истина.

Resulta casi imposible llevar a través de un gentío la antorcha de la verdad sin chamuscar aquí y allá alguna barba.

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

Când ai de facut o lucrare, nu te gândi mereu la întregimea ei; executa fragmentul pe care-l ai în fata, si când ai terminat cu el, mergi mai departe

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

If we put aside the self-awareness standard -- and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy,  proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to) -- it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness' pointed out that those 'neurological substrates' necessary for consciousness (whatever 'consciousness' is) belong to 'all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.' The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance. "The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,' in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of 'animal consciousness' ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about 'that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.' Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when 'there is something that it is to be that organism -- something it islike for the organism.' The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels likethis; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.

La doctrina de la libertad humana sólo prueba que una hipotésis errónea es a veces preferible a otra exacta. El hombre, por cierto, no es libre: pero hace falta haber estudado filosofia muy profundamente para que una concepción de esta naturaleza no nos llame a engaño. Pero éste es un estudio para el cual dispone de tiempo y paciencia sólo un hombre entre mil, y entre los cientos que cuentam com tiempo y paciencia, sólo habrá uno, quizás, que comprenda el sentido de la cosa. Y como las aparencias le son favorables a la doctrina de la libertad, ésta es la más corriente, por ser la más cómoda, y así seguirá siendo en el futuro.