Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

In order to produce the satisfaction of comprehension, there first needs to be the process of comprehension. Furthermore, the overarching idea at hand needs to be something that is actually comprehensible.

Asperger's doesn't define me. It's a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself. People will have a greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway?

Knowledge is first and wisdom is the manifestation of knowledge. To understand this tone and pattern of thinking in the numerical way automatically resonated with me.

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in math—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.

The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.

I'm regarded quite asexually by a lot of people. And the people that understand me the best are nearer to what I understand about me.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

Racists are not born, they are raised. Isolation is the breeding ground for racism. The more you come to know the world around you and people different than you the less likely you will become an extremist. The Church needs to bring the world together.

Here's what I would want for humanity, because this is what I have come to see is true: it's so simple when we listen to people.

When people are forced to interact to survive, their prejudices diminish.

Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs.

Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

You can be standing right in front of the truth and not necessarily see it, and people only get it when they're ready to get it.

People in distress never think that you feel enough.

I wanted people to trust me, despite anything they'd heard. And more than that, I wanted them to know me. Not the stuff they thought they knew about me. No, the real me. I wanted them to get past the rumors. To see beyond the relationships I once had, or maybe still had but that they didn't agree with.

I have spent over half my life teaching love and brotherhood, and I feel that it is better to continue to try to teach or live equality and love than it would be to have hatred or prejudice. Everyone living together in peace and harmony and love - that’s the goal that we seek, and I think that the more people there are who reach that state of mind, the better we will all be.

Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful.

My mission is to change the way people see the world. Everybody has a perspective or a lens they see things through, and hopefully I can adjust that lens or change that lens so that they see things from a different perspective, a different lens.