Aging & Wisdom Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Wisdom, for Lichtenberg, isn’t a trophy of accumulated facts; it’s a sharpening awareness of how easily the mind misfires. The “instrument” here is the Enlightenment’s prized tool: human reason, yoked to sensation and judgment. Calling it an instrument is the tell. Instruments can be calibrated, they can drift, they can be fooled by noise. The line quietly demotes the self from sovereign knower to fallible apparatus - and that’s the scientist speaking, not the mystic.

The intent is almost methodological: becoming “wiser” means improving your error-detection, not your self-confidence. Lichtenberg lived in a moment that worshipped rational clarity while discovering, through experiment and observation, how stubbornly perception and inference resist purity. Subtext: the mind is not a clear window onto reality; it’s a lens with scratches you only notice when the light hits wrong. If you don’t learn your lens’s defects, you don’t get truth, you get a convincing hallucination.

There’s also a sly moral edge. “Better and better” suggests that bias isn’t a one-time confession but a lifelong audit. The quote anticipates modern skepticism about cognition: motivated reasoning, blind spots, the ego’s need to be right. Lichtenberg’s wisdom is less about becoming brilliant than becoming harder to deceive - especially by yourself. In an age that treated reason as salvation, he offers a cooler, more durable ideal: humility as intellectual technology.