The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Habit can restrict our thoughts, anchoring us to certain ideas and making it difficult to move beyond them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg suggests that habits function like a moral friction, providing resistance that keeps our minds engaged with certain thoughts or actions. This friction can be both a hindrance and a link to our experiences, as it makes it challenging to detach our minds from established patterns of thinking or behavior, thus influencing our decision-making and personal growth.
Themes
HabitMindFrictionBehaviorThoughts
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal development, one could say, 'Remember, as Lichtenberg pointed out, habits create a moral friction that binds us to our thoughts.'
More from Georg C. Lichtenberg
All quotes →Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
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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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The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
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?
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
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