Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

1742–1799 · German scientist and satirist

Topics: learning, creativity, science, simplicity

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

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy — at least until we have become as clever as they are.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

  — Georg Christoph 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

• I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

• The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

• The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

• One has to do something new in order to see something new.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

  — Georg Christoph 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 Christoph Lichtenberg

• To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

  — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg