Best 261 quotes of Georg C. Lichtenberg on MyQuotes

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

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    Georg C. 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.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    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.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Ambition and suspicion always go together.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

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    Georg C. 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.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

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    Georg C. 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.

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    Georg C. Lichtenberg

    Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.