Explore Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

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.

Those who never have time do least

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

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

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

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.

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

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.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

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

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

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