12 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Thinking

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes on thinking

5. Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

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.

47. We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

59. Ideas too are a life and a world.

75. There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

87. A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things... The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

95. Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

98. To be content with life - or to live merrily, rather - all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

119. With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

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.

144. People don't think so differently about the events of life as they talk about them.

147. Some people read because they are too lazy to think.