Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Humility

5 quotes

  1. Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

  2. 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.

  3. That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

  4. My inquiries into physics could perhaps be given the title: legacies. For people do also bequeath trifles, after all.

  5. Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

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