Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
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.
I cannot say whether things will get better if we change what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.