"There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Science See all quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg →

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More by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”

“Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.”

“There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.”

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

“What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...”

“There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was s…"

— William Kingdon Clifford

Philosophy1845–1879

#truth

"This steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time…"

— Jane Roberts

Literature1929–1984

#knowledge

"The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument hitherto unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity; …"

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

Philosophy1767–1835

#ethics