He was a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany.
Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term “waste books”, and for his discovery of the strange tree-like patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. He is one of the first scientists to introduce experiments with apparatus in their lectures, Lichtenberg was a most popular and respected figure in the European intellectual circles of his time.
He maintained good relations with most of the great figures of that era, including Goethe and Kant.
(1742 – 1799)
– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes –
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
~ 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
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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 Christoph Lichtenberg
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Virtue by premeditation isn’t worth much.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and times – and this is the worst of all – before we have new ones.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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.
~ 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
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage – he won’t encounter many rivals.
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
