Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.

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.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

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

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

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

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

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?

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.

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

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

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

The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile.

As nations improve, so do their gods.

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

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

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.

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

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

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

God: personified incomprehensibility.

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

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

The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.

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

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

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

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

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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.

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 most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

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

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

Delicacy in woman is strength.

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

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.

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

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

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

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