Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.
Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.
It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.
It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.
Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
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.
A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
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.