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.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Habit can restrict our thoughts, anchoring us to certain ideas and making it difficult to move beyond them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg suggests that habits function like a moral friction, providing resistance that keeps our minds engaged with certain thoughts or actions. This friction can be both a hindrance and a link to our experiences, as it makes it challenging to detach our minds from established patterns of thinking or behavior, thus influencing our decision-making and personal growth.
Themes
HabitMindFrictionBehaviorThoughts
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal development, one could say, 'Remember, as Lichtenberg pointed out, habits create a moral friction that binds us to our thoughts.'
More from Georg C. Lichtenberg
All quotes →Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?
Georg C. LichtenbergRead
Similar quotes
She asked me what made me do such a thing. That is an awkward question because I often can't tell what makes me do things. Sometimes I do them just to find out what I feel like doing them. And sometimes I do them because I want to have some exciting things to tell my grandchildren.
Lucy Maud MontgomeryRead
I believe that very much of current Arminianism is simply ignorance of gospel doctrine; and if people began to study their Bibles, and to take the Word of God as they find it, they must inevitably, if believers, rise up to rejoice in the doctrines of grace.
Charles SpurgeonRead
Vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.
John Gresham MachenRead
The Yogi conquers the body by the practice of asanas, making the body a fit vehicle for the spirit. The Yogi knows that it is a necessary vehicle for the spirit, for a soul without a body is like a bird deprived of its power to fly.
B.K.S. IyengarRead
Cursed be the verse, how well so e'er it flow, That tends to make one worthy man my foe.
Alexander PopeRead
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone WeilRead