Explore Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.