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Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Cuthbert Faulkner		Monday Oct 13, 2025
		Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969

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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 Christoph Lichtenberg

Quote Author: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

	Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
	Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 - 24 February 1799) was a German scientist, satirist and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his notebooks published posthumously, which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term. Read More

Other Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

You can make a better living in the world as a soothsayer than as a truthsayer.

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

The feeling of health is acquired only through sickness.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, 'Oh, I see. That's how it must be.' This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself -- on which is founded the entire integral calculus -- is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

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

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede, not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our mouths.

Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all.

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

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.