11 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Wisdom

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes on wisdom

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.

33. We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

40. A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

53. 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.

80. We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

90. One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

93. It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

99. It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

100. Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

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

160. We live in a world in which one fool makes many fools but one wise man only a few wise men.