G. C. Lichtenberg Quotes
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.
Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
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.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
