Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg treats the self like a body in motion: always growing, always shedding, rarely stopping to mourn the collateral. The trousers image is doing sly double work. It’s domestic, even comic, but it smuggles in a brutal premise: “fit” is not a moral category. You don’t betray your pants; you simply stop being the person they were made for. By extending the metaphor to acquaintances, libraries, and principles, he punctures the Enlightenment fantasy of steady accumulation - more friends, more books, more refined ethics, forever. Progress here is less ladder than molting.

The real bite is in his timing: we often outgrow things “before they’re worn out.” That line refuses the comforting narrative that change arrives only when something is broken. Sometimes you leave a friendship or an idea not because it failed, but because you did what living does: expanded, twisted, reoriented. Then he tightens the screw: the worst case is outgrowing old forms “before we have new ones.” That’s the awkward, under-discussed middle zone - the intellectual and emotional draftiness of transition. It’s not just loneliness; it’s epistemic precarity, a period when your former principles no longer cover you and your new ones haven’t been tailored.

Context matters: Lichtenberg, an Enlightenment-era scientist with a satirist’s eye, distrusted grand systems. His aphorisms often aim at the vanity of coherence. Here he’s warning that development isn’t clean or heroic; it’s frequently ill-timed, socially costly, and temporarily humiliating. Growth, he implies, is a little indecent: you can’t do it without ending up briefly underdressed.