G. C. Lichtenberg Quotes
There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.
I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
To write brashly about some things, it is almost necessary not to know much about them.
It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.
The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.
He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.
Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.
Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.
Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.
When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.
...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.
Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.
There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".
I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
To make yourself something less than you can be - that too is a form of suicide.
Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers we outgrow acquaintances libraries principles etc. at times before they're worn out and times-and this is the worst of all-before we have new ones.
Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay than they think.
Everyone is a genius at least once a year a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
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 can't count above fourteen.
