Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

Books are men of higher stature, and the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.

Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages.

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

Books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.

The gains in education are never really lost. Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth, like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men.

The wealth of mankind is the wisdom they leave.

Unlike Churchill, I have no plans to shape history. . . . Socrates gave advice

Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man.... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself.

To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions.

My theory is that there is a finite amount of intelligence in a family, and you're supposed to gradually transfer it to your children over a period of many years. This is why your parents started to get so stupid just at the time in your life when you were getting really smart.

It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning.

Scientific power is like inherited wealth; attained without discipline. You read about what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast.

Those who are wise ambassadors of the word have no other object in view than to free as far as they can their hearers from weak opinions, and to endue them with intelligence.

Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him; but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.

By labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.

One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.

Experience comes in two different flavors: your own and the experience of others. Most people can learn from their own experiences quite well, but many people simply ignore the experiences and lessons of others.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.

The images of mens wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages

(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.

The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.

Knowledge cannot be stolen from us. It cannot be bought or sold. We may be poor, and the sheriff may come and sell our furniture, or drive away our cow, or take our pet lamb, and leave us homeless and penniless; but he cannot lay the law's hand upon the jewelry of our minds.

As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.