Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

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

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

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

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

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

I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.

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

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.

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.

Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.

I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.

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

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.

Reading means borrowing.

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

There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.

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.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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.

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

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

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, claps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.

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.

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

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

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