Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

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.

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

Those who never have time do least

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.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

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

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

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

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

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

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.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

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.

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

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

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.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

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.

A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

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.

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

Too much is unwholesome.

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.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

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

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.