G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg Quotes

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg Quotes. Below is a collection of famous G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

By G. C. (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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) 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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

By G. C. (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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) 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.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

By G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg