Georg c. lichtenberg quotes

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

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.

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

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.

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.

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

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

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

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

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

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.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

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.

Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

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

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.

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

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

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

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

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

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

A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

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

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

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

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

There are many who believe that 'Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence!' Whether you are indeed 'married' or if you are 'single', I am sure that funny quotes on weddings and marriages always tend to put a wicked smile to the face. It is often said that 'People who are married are often desperate to get out of it and people who are single can't wait to get in!'

Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.

The most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

In every man there is something of all men.

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.

Reading means borrowing.

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

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.

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

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.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

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.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

Those who never have time do least

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

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

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

We now possess four principles of morality: 1) a philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law; 2) a religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love of God; 3) a human: do good because it will promote your happiness, out of self-love; 4) a political: do good because it will promote the welfare of the society of which you are a part, out of love of society having regard to yourself. But is this not all one single principle, only viewed from different sides?

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

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

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

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

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.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

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

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

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

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

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.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

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

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

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

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

The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

Delicacy in woman is strength.

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.

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

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

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

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

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.

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

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

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.

As nations improve, so do their gods.

An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

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

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

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.