Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

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.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

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

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

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.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

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.

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

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.

In every man there is something of all men.

In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

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.

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.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.

Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

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.

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.

Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!

Those who never have time do least

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.