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Quotes from Aphorisms — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

1742–1799 Germany

← All quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

126 quotes

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

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

Man loves company — even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

Aphorisms (1765)

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Aphorisms (1765)

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

Aphorisms (1765)

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.

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

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.

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

Aphorisms (1765)

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.

Aphorisms (1765)

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

Aphorisms (1765)

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

Aphorisms (1765)

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.

Aphorisms (1765)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.