13 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Philosophy

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes on philosophy

6. It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

7. 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.

10. There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points 'born' and 'died' farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.

16. We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.

45. Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

59. Ideas too are a life and a world.

96. Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

112. If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

116. What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

126. First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

127. God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

142. One of the strangest applications of reason is to believe that it is a masterpiece to abstain from using it and thus, born with wings, to cut them off.

167. Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone... He speaks from the subterranean depths. Only he who himself digs deep hears him.