G. C. Lichtenberg Quotes
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.
The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
