Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

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.

It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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.

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.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

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.

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.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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.

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

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.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

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.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."

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.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

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?

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

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.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

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.

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.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.