“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 cannot count above fourteen.”
To see every day how people get the name ‘genius’ just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name ‘millipede’ - not because they have that many feet, but because most people don’t want to count to 14 - this has had the result that I don’t believe anyone any more without checking. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters (1969), 48, translated by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.
My source was this Roger Kimball article. I just found the book that Kimball references on Google Books and it doesn’t seem to contain any version of that quote, so for now I’d guess that your version is more accurate. Ideally we’d want to find the original German version.
The German version a quick google search finds in a few places on the web, all unsourced, is very close to the first version, except that Tausendfüß(l)er literally means millipede, centipede would be Hundertfüß(l)er.
I found a site which purports to offer Notebook F, from which the quote is supposed to be taken—the text there reads:
Ich kann nicht leugnen, mein Mißtrauen gegen den Geschmack unserer Zeit ist bei mir vielleicht zu einer tadelnswürdigen Höhe gestiegen. Täglich zu sehen wie Leute zum Namen Genie kommen, wie die Keller – Esel zum Namen Tausendfuß, nicht weil sie so viele Füße haben, sondern weil die meisten nicht bis auf 14 zählen wollen, hat gemacht, daß ich keinem mehr ohne Prüfung glaube.
which appears to conform with the Mautner & Hatfield text.
It could be that Moritz Carrière is to fault. In his Aesthetik, he quotes Lichtenberg as claiming people cannot count to sixteen.
The Lichtenberg reader (1959) also contains the same essay and is available at my local library—I’m not invested enough in the issue to try to track it down, though.
“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 cannot count above fourteen.”
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
related: The Level Above Mine
Seeking a citation, I found the following:
...on this horribly-formatted website. Google Books verifies.
(P.S. Note that the original is in German.)
My source was this Roger Kimball article. I just found the book that Kimball references on Google Books and it doesn’t seem to contain any version of that quote, so for now I’d guess that your version is more accurate. Ideally we’d want to find the original German version.
The German version a quick google search finds in a few places on the web, all unsourced, is very close to the first version, except that Tausendfüß(l)er literally means millipede, centipede would be Hundertfüß(l)er.
I found a site which purports to offer Notebook F, from which the quote is supposed to be taken—the text there reads:
which appears to conform with the Mautner & Hatfield text.
It could be that Moritz Carrière is to fault. In his Aesthetik, he quotes Lichtenberg as claiming people cannot count to sixteen.
The Lichtenberg reader (1959) also contains the same essay and is available at my local library—I’m not invested enough in the issue to try to track it down, though.